There's no more to it than that.
The Discovery Institute, the leading proponent of the recent version of ID, spilled the beans in the Wedge Strategy, a document somehow leaked from their organization.
While they might now claim that ID has no relation to religion, this is what they said in the Wedge Strategy:
We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions. ...Governing Goals
--To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.
--To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.
Doesn't sound much like science to me, eh?
Sounds a lot more like a stealth effort to promote religion under the guise of science, much like creation "science" prior to its unfortunate demise in the 1988 Supreme Court decision Edwards v. Aguillard.
Whatever it sounds like to you does not make the Discovery Institute synonymous with Intelligent Design. And the fact that DI has an agenda does not make ID any more a religion than Richard Dawkins pronouncements makes his writings science.
What they've done is played on the fears of the "Natural Selection" worshippers and dragged in the prospect of "God's Gonna' Get You", and there you have it.
It's like attending Reverend Phelps church ~ looks like a church, sounds like a church, uses all the church words, but their business is to get rid of homosexuals come Hell or Highwater.
To wit, the Discovery Institute and Fred Phelps are both "false witnesses" who have an agenda not at all consistent with that of those who they seek to associate with.