I think a lot of the "religious" feeling I get from FP advocates is the constant focus on purity and the "No, you AREN'T DOING IT RIGHT!!!" kinds of tantrums. You HAVE to understand the nuance. You HAVE to participate in these strange little paradigms that esoteric thinkers have come up with. Ultimately, I think of FP languages like Haskell as playgrounds to pilot bleeding-edge ideas before the best ideas get incorporated into languages that are widely used in production.
Ultimately, some real-world processes are just procedural, and procedural languages are easier to apply to them. When it comes to callbacks, mapping functions to a list, etc., it's pretty clear to me that FP paradigms are superior.
In other words, I think it's part fad/religion, but as with anything, you can learn from it and take the good parts.