For someone who is concerned to fight off reductionist accounts of religion by being 'clear about what we're talking about when we talk about it', Nicholas Buxton doesn't do too good a job. He offers one bad argument after another.
A religion, he says, is a story making sense for its adherents of what otherwise doesn't. Everyone needs stories like that, even the non-religious who have their own type. This shows, for him, that we are 'essentially religious animals'. No. If it shows anything, it would be that we are story-telling animals.
Next Buxton gives examples of 'mythic narratives' adopted by people who aren't religious: a belief in progress as inevitable; a belief in universal salvation as a result of the spread of global capitalism; the claim that competition is more basic to human nature than cooperation. That's a strange procedure - to defend a belief system criticized for putting itself beyond the tests of evidence and critical reason, by saying that there are also other poorly based sets of beliefs. Unless Buxton's thesis is the obscurantist one that no beliefs can be rationally (provisionally etc) held, the fact that there have been some weak or crazy beliefs held by atheists is of no help to the defence of religion.
Finally, Buxton laments the commodification of all human values, presenting Christian belief as the answer to this; for it is the vehicle of 'a radical vision of human flourishing'. So much the better for it wherever and whenever it is that. But in common with the rest of his argument, there is nothing whatever here about the specifity of religion that makes it a particularly apt opponent of commodification. An elementary humanism does the same job.