Informative thread necromancy.
The media frenzy over the "white widow" story last week actually made me think of this thread.. [url]http://nypost.com/2013/09/29/how-an-average-english-girl-became-the-white-widow/[/url]
Seems like a rather representative case-study in the social-situational factors driving individuals towards following unorthodox, fringe, and radical religious ideologies or factions that they were not born into. Appears to be a dynamic between the particular individual's overwhelming desire for structure and social predictability and the perception that certain socio-religious contexts fulfills that Maslow need -- even if only based on questionable traditions, practices and belief-systems, apparently.