I think there's a rhetoric out there, that "everybody needs a religion," and that identifies any vehemently held ideology or close-knit social group as a religion. It's tautological. This is exacerbated by the difficulty of forming a general definition of "religion" that isn't riddled with exceptions. Defining "religion" broadly enough to include all religions makes it end up including everything else too.

But "your group is a religion too" seems like a combination of confirmation bias and tu quoque fallacy.