With the possible exception of suicides committed in response to prolonged, painful illnesses, the general social consensus in advanced industrialized nations seems to be that suicide is an irrational act, explainable chiefly in terms of some form of mental derangement. As a consequence of this widespread cultural judgment, religious groups that commit mass suicide as well as individuals identified as religious-motivated suicide bombers or self-immolators are quickly categorized as people motivated by “fanaticism.” In contrast, however, people who willingly sacrifice their lives for a national cause such as war are valorized as heroic. Louise Richardson, a leading expert on terrorism, notes that self-sacrifice in time of war is really not so distant from suicide terrorism:
I will argue that in killing themselves in order to kill others they are behaving in a way that is entirely consistent with the behaviour of soldiers throughout the ages. Military historians have long ago convinced us that what drove young men over the trenches and out of the foxholes was fierce loyalty to their small band of brothers. This may appear surprising, as we tend to think of suicide attacks as individual actions, but in fact there has been no recorded case of terrorist simply deciding to become a martyr, finding the explosives and making a plan. Instead, in every known martyrdom operation, the group plays an essential role in planning the terrorist attack and in training, sustaining and supervising the volunteer. The average martyrdom operation requires a supporting cast of about ten others. In societies the world over we reserve our highest honours for those who have given their lives for their country. Public squares everywhere are filled with monuments to those who have been victorious in battle. Suicide terrorists seek honours like these and their handlers make sure they get them. (Richardson 2006: 136)
The conclusion that a suicide bomber or a strange religious group committing mass suicide is crazy is also reinforced by a broader cultural judgment that associates religion with irrationality, so that any sort of violence perpetrated by a person identified as a religious actor is immediately viewed as an example of religious violence that, seemingly by definition, is not open to rational examination (as discussed in, for example, Cavanaugh 2009). Additionally, in the specific case of suicide bombers who are also Muslims, Mattias Gardell, in his contribution to this volume, asks whether the actors’ foreignness is a factor: Is it because this act is carried out by the Other? Is it because we see the behavior through an Orientalist lens, a dramatic outbreak of irrational barbarian violence against civilization?
Though this sort of xenophobia likely plays a role in our judgment of Middle Eastern suicide bombers and Buddhist self-immolators, we tend to make parallel evaluations when members of alternative religions carry out group suicides. Of the major violent incidents involving new religious movements (NRMs)—the Jonestown murder-suicides (1978), the ATF/FBI raid on the Mount Carmel community (1993), the Solar Temple murder-suicides (1994, 1995, and 1997), the Tokyo subway poison gas attack (1995), the Heaven’s Gate suicides (1997), and the murder-suicides of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda (2000)—the focal violence of four out of six of these events were acts of mass suicide. It has also been argued (most recently by Kenneth Newport in his 2006 book The Branch Davidians of Waco) that the members of the Mount Carmel community intentionally committed suicide. If Newport is correct, then that would mean that every NRM involved in a major act of violence except Aum Shinrikyo was a “suicide cult.” Additionally, other NRMs, from Falun Gong to Chen Dao, have been portrayed as suicidal.
When discussing “suicide cults,” contemporary analysts also often refer to what they think of as being historical precedents, such as the ancient community of Masada that famously committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the Romans. Another frequently mentioned historical example of religiously motivated mass suicide is the Russian Old Believers, who burned themselves (sometimes along with others trapped inside churches they had torched) rather than adopt liturgical changes they believed would cause them to lose their salvation. Is there some common thread that unites these various phenomena?
Despite surface similarities, the situations of the communities involved in suicide violence turn out to be too diverse to bring together under one explanatory scheme. In a handful of cases, one can point to religion as being a key motivator. But in most cases, specific local sociological and political factors offer more compelling explanations. For example, Jonestown, the Solar Temple, and Heaven’s Gate share certain characteristics, but, for the most part, these cannot be extended to suicide bombers and to other categories of suicide involving religious actors.
What is common across these diverse case studies is a common stereotype of religion as an irrational force that pushes fanatics to undertake acts of violence. This stereotype has been thoughtlessly applied by the media to religious groups that have no suicidal inclinations, such as the Chen Dao UFO religion, which was incessantly portrayed as another Heaven’s Gate during its short sojourn in the media spotlight. The stereotype of fanatical religious groups that are, by their very nature, inclined to commit suicide can also be applied by government agencies to cover other kinds of machinations, as in the case of the People’s Republic of China’s staging of apparent suicides by Falun Gong members. Thus, in addition to analyzing mass suicides of religious groups, many of the chapters in the present collection will provide critical examinations of the essentialist stereotype of “religious suicide.”
The first two chapters examine historical group suicides. In 73 AD, a group of 967 Jewish assassins and rebels—Sicarii—were trapped on top of the fortress of Masada, near the shore of the Dead Sea, as the Imperial Roman Army erected a siege system around the fortress. When the besieged realized that there was no hope for winning or escaping, they all committed suicide on the fifteenth day of Xanthicus. Only seven of the besieged managed to hide themselves and survive the mass suicide. This historical narrative, given to us by Josephus Flavius, was transformed by secular Zionists in the twentieth century from a narrative of defeat and mass suicide of the Sicarii, into a heroic mythical tale that served as one of the founding myths of the state of Israel. In “The Sicarii Suicide on Masada and the Foundation of a National Myth,” Nachman Ben-Yehuda examines this tale, contrasting the historical vs. the mythical narrative and explaining how and why the Masada mythical narrative was created, and how it served as a foundation myth.
In “Religious Mass Suicide Before Jonestown: The Russian Old Believers,” Thomas Robbins examines another series of prominent historical group suicides. Over a period of several decades in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Russia, tens of thousands of “Old Believers” committed suicide, generally by self-immolation. Most of the suicides were not individual acts but transpired in the context of catastrophic collective events at hermitages or monasteries. In several instances, the number of persons who perished at a burned-out settlement far exceeded the number of deaths at Jonestown. Convergences with the Peoples Temple holocaust include: a general climate of apocalyptic excitation; a sectarian Manichean outlook which perceived absolute evil triumphant in the world, and in which “political” themes became more prominent over time, and a conviction of imminent armed assault by hostile forces. Both the Old Believers and Peoples Temple experienced difficulties in resolving the tension between the impulse to violently confront a demonic state and the desire to develop a communal refuge where they could live according to their faith. Marked divergences include the degree of actual persecution, and the post-holocaust survival and growth of the Old Believers.
The second section examines four alternative religious groups that made headlines in the 1990s with spectacular mass suicides. In Chapter 3, “Purification, Illumination, and Death: The Murder-Suicides of the Order of the Solar Temple,” Henrik Bogdan examines the Solar Temple. In October 1994, 53 members of the order in Switzerland and Québec were murdered or committed suicide. These tragic events were followed by two smaller group suicides in subsequent years, and the Solar Temple quickly became one of the most notorious and discussed “cults.” However, it soon turned out that the Solar Temple defied the stereotypical understanding of a cult or new religious movement in that it was not a marginalized organization. On the contrary, members were affluent and were well-connected with the surrounding society. Previous attempts to understand the murder-suicides of the Solar Temple have either focused on the roles of the leaders of the group, or on the increasingly apocalyptic teachings of the movement and how these were projected on the surrounding society. Bogdan’s chapter focuses more on the ritual practices of the movement and on its rank-and-file members, and asks what sort of world-view, and what ritual practices, did the members share, and how is this related to the murder-suicides of the Solar Temple?
Chapter 4, Rebecca Moore’s “Suicide, Murder, and Martyrdom: The Deaths in Jonestown, Guyana,” examines the first contemporary religious group involved in mass suicide. Initial reports of the deaths that occurred in Jonestown, Guyana in November 1978 characterized them as mass suicides. As accounts of the deaths of children and old people emerged, however, the events began to be described as murder, especially by conspiracy theorists. A narrative of martyrdom pervaded life in Jonestown, as well as life within Peoples Temple, the group sponsoring the agricultural commune. Jim Jones, the group’s leader, appropriated and re-interpreted the Black Panther Party rhetoric of revolutionary suicide. This act of protest was rehearsed many times in Jonestown. Some survivors who lived in Jonestown challenge the assertion that residents took these rehearsals seriously, although a number of audiotapes have parents providing the justification for killing their children to save them from torture; others on tape state that they are taking their own lives as a rejection of capitalism. In any event, by killing the children first, the mass suicides of the parents seemed virtually assured.
Heaven’s Gate is an almost prototypical suicide group, at least as most people understand the term. The group’s 1997 “exit” in Rancho Santa Fe, California, resulted in the death of all of the group’s full-time members, and today the movement is defunct. Yet Heaven’s Gate did not begin as a group oriented around the idea of suicide. In “Individual Suicide and the End of the World: Destruction and Transformation in UFO and Alien-Based Religions,” Carole M. Cusack situates Heaven’s Gate in terms of its continuities with certain popular cultural eschatologies, such as the influential “alien messiah” film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and in terms of its continuities with the apocalyptic eschatologies of prior UFO/alien-based new religions. Cusack also considers the roots of the group suicide in the movement’s worldview, as well as the influence of Marshall Applewhite’s response to the death of Bonnie Lu Nettles, his platonic partner.
In the spring of 2000, nearly a thousand members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God died in a series of murder-suicides in and around Kanungu, Uganda. While a volume of material has been produced by scholars detailing other similar cases in Europe and the US, the MRTCG has received very little interest, particularly by these scholars. In “The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God One Decade On,” John Walliss’s aim is to revisit the case of the MRTCG. He particularly discusses the subsequent commentary that has been produced in order to see whether a firmer series of answers can be obtained as to the reasons behind the murder suicides.
During the last ten years, dubbed as “the Age of the War on Terror,” terrorism, or more specifically “suicide terrorism,” has almost exclusively has been attributed by the media and by some intellectuals to denote Muslims’ predisposition to terrorism. However, there have been numerous incidents of terrorism in the same period perpetrated by non-Muslims highlighting the cultural diversity of terrorism. In “A Sociological Analysis of Muslim Terrorism,” Jan A. Ali explores suicide terrorism not as a religio-cultural but a sociological phenomenon. Ali looks at some of the pivotal causes and consequences of it using social categorization theory and Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as tools of analysis, and argues that Muslim suicide terrorism is a response to the negative consequences of the crisis of modernity.
Glorification of warriors who sacrifice their lives to inflict harm or to defeat the enemy has been a recurrent feature of heroic tales for many centuries, so why we are filled with such revulsion against “suicide” attacks? In “So Costly a Sacrifice Upon the Altar of Freedom,” Mattias Gardell examines suicide attacks as resistance strategy, examining how the method is perceived in the environments from which the players come, mainly from Palestine, where Gardell conducted field studies during the second Intifada. What drives a person to use their life as a weapon? Why are people horrified more at a suicide attack that causes dozens of deaths over a bomb attack that takes many more lives?
Since the 1960s, several thousand people have died in suicides intended as sacrifices. Violence against the self can appear in the form of suicide bombing, where the perpetrator aims to extinguish the life of as many people as possible by giving up their own. In contrast, there are self-killings that do not aim to harm anybody else. These are the fast-unto-death suicides where a person vows not to eat until a certain demand is fulfilled, and self-immolation, a protest suicide—by means of fire or otherwise—in service of a political or ideological goal. Self-immolation is not an ordinary suicide or self-destructive act, but has a religious dimension in Buddhism since one’s own body is seen as a gift for a greater cause. In “Burning Buddhists: Self-Immolation as Political Protest,” Katarina Plank highlights the specific relevant Buddhist ritual and textual heritage in her analysis of the recent wave of self-immolations in Tibet. She incorporates this act into a wider Buddhist set of practices called “gift of the body.” The first political sacrifices made in the 1960s were intended to save Buddhism at a time when it was perceived as being threatened in South Vietnam; later, the focus shifted towards bringing an end to the Vietnam War. As a result, their sacrifices were addressed to Vietnamese politicians and to the global community. Nearly fifty years later, a new wave of self-immolations have occurred in Tibet—with previously no tradition of self-immolation—and this time, the fiery suicides by Tibetan monks and former monks can be seen as an expression of the nationalist struggle for a free Tibet. People who die in hunger strikes or protest suicides often leave behind letters for publication after death; since the 1980s, suicide bombers have recorded “martyrdom videos” in which they read aloud their last will and testament and sometimes are subsequently filmed perpetrating their attack. In “Dying to Tell: Media Orchestration of Politically Motivated Suicide,” Lorenz Graitl asks what is the audience urged to do? How is violence against oneself and/or others justified? What is the underlying logic? What function do these spectacular representations serve?
Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa, is a religious movement that arose from the Qigong boom of the 1990s. It first rippled through the consciousness of western media when adherents surrounded the seat of the Chinese government and staged a peaceful mass protest. After the movement was outlawed in 1999, there has been a propaganda war between Falun Gong adherents and the Chinese government, both claiming the other guilty of atrocities and conspiratorial plots. In 2001, five Falun Gong protesters set themselves ablaze in Tiananmen Square resulting in the death of two; Falun Gong spokespeople subsequently claimed that the Chinese government had staged the suicides. In “Death by Whose Hand? Falun Gong and Suicide,” Helen Farley examines the complex relationship between Falun Gong and the Chinese government, exploring the reality behind the claims and counterclaims in relation to the former’s stated opposition to suicide. This will be contrasted with other Falun Gong writings which encourage adherents to refuse medical treatment and medication in order to rid themselves of karma.
Ever since Jonestown, part of the “cult” stereotype has been that NRMs are volatile groups, ready to commit group suicide at the drop of a hat. The assumption that the Branch Davidian community was a potential Jonestown may or may not have contributed to the initial ill-advised ATF raid. But, following the fiery holocaust set in motion by the FBI raid 51 days later, defenders of these agencies’ actions uniformly portrayed the Davidians as having been a “suicide group.” In “The Mount Carmel Holocaust: Suicide or Execution?,” James R. Lewis presents an overview of the Davidian community, focusing particular attention on evidence that the group was not inclined to suicide. Rather, the Davidians were victims of law enforcement malfeasance.
As the central storyteller in and of American life, television has played a profound role in the maintenance and dissemination of the cult stereotype. By emphasizing these stereotypical features, television shows firmly situate cults as abnormal and dangerous entities on the American religious landscape. Many of these televised portrayals include issues of cult violence, specifically suicide. In “Rescripting the Past: Suicide Cults on Television,” Lynn S. Neal analyzes how fictional American television shows from South Park to CSI have depicted the relationship between cults and suicide. In addition to episode analysis, this chapter addresses the role that popular culture plays in perpetuating anti-cult ideas and attitudes.
In “Why Muslims Kill Themselves on Film: From Girard’s Victimage Mechanism to a Radical Constructivist Explanation,” Christopher Hartney takes a methodological approach to representations of suicide on film that is situated between a Girardian victimage approach on one side, and a radical constructivist approach on the other. With thematics on cinema and suicide identified in this section of the chapter, the chapter demonstrates how such thematics are developed or distorted when Muslim characters are introduced to the screen. The four small case studies in this section include analysis of recent examples, including Peter Berg’s Hollywood film The Kingdom and Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana.
Cavanaugh, William T. (2009). The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press.
Richardson, Louise (2006). What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Terrorist Threat. London: John Murray.