He's right about this. We tend to think of religion as being about god. But it's possible for an atheist who doesn't believe in the existence of a deity to be a religious person. And there really is no such thing as an irreligious society.

Humans will rally around something and give it a kind of divine status. It's in our nature. And it's common for us to do it around leaders. It's a way we socialize and comprehend abstract ideas and structures that aren't immediately relevant at our individual level of consciousness.

The church is as much an implement of state power as the state is an implement of moral power. It's a fairly novel idea to separate these into separate power structures and has really only taken hold in western society over the last couple of centuries.

However the act of worship is something that all humans do. And even when you remove the church, and the increasingly secular nature of western spcieites is seeing decrease in church attendance, the social worship phenomenon simply takes other forms. Activism, protests, rallies, all are humans gathering around something or someone and performing a kind of group lamentation, a prayer if you will, but they are praying to the state or to leadership or simply to the ideals of humanism rather than towards any deity in particular.

It's somewhat interesting to me, how in American society many will take a deeply christian identity and say they won't worship any God except God himself. Yet they have no issues with the American phenomenon of flag worship, indeed they tend to want the schools to make their children say the American prayer to the flag each morning. They stand in silence and attention to displays of over military patriotism at sporting events and the like. And at no point do they stop to think that perhaps they have made the state into a false idol of sorts. Truly a fascinating culture.