One cannot do a study to compare a belief system to another one and call them both religions unless you detail the tenets of those belief systems. These are the statements which you MUST believe in to belong to that religion. Without agreeing to them all, you could be kicked out of that religion as a Heretic. I agree that the four functions are common to many religion but for example some religions have few rituals. Cults have what we would think of as very odd "meaning and purpose.

Meaning; Nature's laws is the only so called religion I can mostly understand. Bio organisms and individualism finds better meanings. Centroism has very little meaning to me.
Purpose- I've alway set and sacrifice my purpose in life as I go along,
Community I love science and critical thinking which some are great at here Although many here have influenced by political and corporationism science guiding them. Artist are my strongest tribe.
Rituals- My strength is not in words, being here helps my visual pictures and creative concepts for greater expression in my sculpture works. Agnostic.com are very hard critic's . I get too many compliments on the physical outside world, yet learn less from it.

I’m a little late to this, but I am not much of a fan of the “Nones” categorization. First off it’s one of those privative catch-all terms like “invertebrate”. Knowing an animal is excluded from the vertebrate group doesn’t yield much information as invertebrates are a disparate group.

The key lacking with “nones” is formal religious affiliation. I recall atheists locking on to this category with glee. Yet: “However, a new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, conducted jointly with the PBS television program Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, finds that many of the country’s 46 million unaffiliated adults are religious or spiritual in some way. Two-thirds of them say they believe in God (68%). More than half say they often feel a deep connection with nature and the earth (58%), while more than a third classify themselves as “spiritual” but not “religious” (37%), and one-in-five (21%) say they pray every day. In addition, most religiously unaffiliated Americans think that churches and other religious institutions benefit society by strengthening community bonds and aiding the poor.

With few exceptions, though, the unaffiliated say they are not looking for a religion that would be right for them. Overwhelmingly, they think that religious organizations are too concerned with money and power, too focused on rules and too involved in politics.”

[pewresearch.org]

Probably a bit out of date. A majority believed then in God. A large subset were still “spiritual”.

The lack of affiliation itself might be a trend, along the lines of Putnam’s “bowling alone” notion. People seem to disaffiliate from formal political parties but are still politically minded.

It’s your binding of ideology and religion that’s kinda troubling in itself. Seems a subtle way to brand “the woke” or SJWs as religious, a tactic I’ve seen used by the antiwoke. Since just about any social media discussion winds up sucked into that moral panic tractor beam framing any more, it sure seems where this is headed.

A quote from the book:
"It’s the story of how more and more Americans—and particularly how more and more millennials—envision themselves as creators of their own bespoke religions, mixing and matching spiritual and aesthetic and experiential and philosophical traditions. The Remixed hunger for the same things human beings have always longed for: a sense of meaning in the world and personal purpose within that meaning, a community to share that experience with, and rituals to bring the power of that experience into achievable, everyday life. "

No. I would not say that none is a religion, because I would add another point to the list of things that you need before you can claim something as a religion. And that is that to be a religion, something has to make a claim of authority. ( Though it is true that the authority does not have to come from a god.)

Which since getting nones to agree, has often been described as herding cats, "none" clearly does not make claims to have an authority. And I am sure that many other people could think of many other criteria to add to the list. So this is a case of T. I. Burton, making your list of evidence required, to fit your intended outcome.

The syllogism falls at the final hurdle ie. it is a non sequitur.

1. Many ideologies are religions because they entail meaning, purpose, community and ritual.

2. Many who are unaffiliated to religion also seek meaning, purpose, community and ritual.

3. Therefore religion does not require gods.

the above ASSumes i want or need a "meaningful" life......

Religions have doctrine; dogma or laws. Religions occur when people share the same belief and someone organises things.
A Shared belief will often have a shared purpose. That is community.
Nones have no doctrine. Religious like fever is displayed by some with shared purpose but are they religions or fleeting cults?

I think anyone who truly understands the nature of reality and meaning/purpose in relation to metaphysical properties the way religions/ the religious explain would wholly disagree that a "none" would meet the first two requirements.

This all seems very true on the surface but then exceptions creep in. For example, a person can be in church and hear the minister claim that we all believe alike. Those of us in this meeting all believe the same things religiously. In private talks with any of these people you find that it is not true. This is also the reason there are so many religious denominations.

Sure, why not? Religion, after all, does not necessarily have to be about belief in supernatural forces or beings. The word "religion" comes from the Italian "religgio," meaning re-linking, as in finding the (lost) connection between one's self and his/her/their cosmic origins. In this sense, science can be considered a form of religion.