We see religious tendencies in the secular world because we really don't know what we're doing running the secular world. Nobody really knows how to organize an economy to work well. All the plausible systems have failed at some point, often in unexpected ways.

"Free markets" are just turning loose an optimizer that optimizes for - something. Central planning just pushes the problem back to the planning level. Combining the two for political ends tends to produce strange results because economics has very poor predictive power.

This uncertainty tends to drive people to faith-based positions. That doesn't work either, but it satisfies some basic human need.