re: a mindset that inclines them to take more extreme conservative and religious positions

If I may offer an alternate explanation: the mind of an engineer cannot tolerate things that are broken. He (or she) is driven by the notion of improvement, efficiency, and Things Working Correctly.

Terrorists come from badly damaged societies, which have constraints which make "normal" solutions (usually political) impossible -- thus they resort to extreme and usually reprehensible solutions. Nothing, to this sort of person, is worse than living with a broken system.