You don't need a non-religious example; environmentalism is a religion. Its precepts include that nature is good, that human activity is bad, and that by existing we are "destroying the planet" by taking it further away from some perfect pristine state that it would otherwise be in without our influence. The exact method as to how we are alleged to be "destroying the planet" changes from one generation to another, but it will never change that we are doing so. And so long as we raise children to believe in environmentalism, some of those kids will grow up to be scientists who find ways to cloak their religious views in a thin veneer of science...but that doesn't make them scientific views.
I don't think it's helpful to call environmentalism a religion. It's a non-objective ideology, and I wish there were a single word for such a thing. Maybe we ought to redefine the word "religion" to mean "non-objective ideology," though. Then we could call it a religion.
Anyway, Robinson was not espousing environmentalism so much as distant-future-generation-ism. That's a distinctive (but equally incorrect) moral position. Not all environmentalists subscribe to the future-generational-imperative, and vice versa.
I actually find the future-generational-imperative to be more widely and uncritically assumed by everyday people, so probably more important to point that out than just plain old environmentalism.
Can you think of any other "non-objective ideologies" that are as religion-like as environmentalism? I mean, I suppose you could describe some other sorts of ideologues as worshipping "the market" or "society" or "progress" or "history" or some such, but none of those are as god-esque as "Gaia" or "Mother Nature". Are they? Or are there others I've overlooked?
The main reason I tend to think of it as a secular religion is due to the close specific parallels with apocalyptic Christianity. You've got this same idea of an original state of grace (the way the indians lived) that mankind has since fallen from, the idea that people have committed sinful acts against the deity (by polluting) and have ways they should worship/repent to it (recycling, planting trees, passing on their ideology to others...). Most of all the sense that we are doomed unless we change our ways because Mother Nature will fight back and punish us for our sins against it just feels SO Christian - not in the modern sense but more the older sense of standing on a street corner with a "the end of the world is nigh!" signboard. :-)
Sure, there's definitely some Gaia-worshipers here and there, but you're miscasting the environmentalism movement if you think they're a majority or even a driving force. I'd place the driving forces as first some sort of rational self-interest -- if your house is on fire, you don't need to worship the house to want to put out the fire -- and second as some sort of combination of a sense of stewardship and guilt, stewardship, a need to protect and care for things, and guilt at taking what we feel isn't ours. The guilt might blend into Gaia-ism, but I don't think it must.
