My French friend told me they were created because religion helped with promoting their ideas. Did it involve any form of religious services?
Yep!
The most famous one is the festival of the supreme being, which was meant to be a yearly event but only took place once. The National Assembly organized a celebration in Paris that involved lots of flowers, hymns, speeches, and an artificial mountain built on the Champ de Mars. Similar festivals were held on the same day in other parts of the country, as well.
Before that, there were the Festivals of Reason. The most important one was held in the Notre Dame cathedral, but various kinds of worship happened all over the country. The forms varied widely, in various places the worship took the form of deism, a kind of ritualistic atheism, worshiping revolutionary martyrs, or propagating a revolutionized kind of Christianity.
There were also suggestions for other kinds of public worship that never came to fruition. The revolutionaries had a new calendar, with a new system of ten-day weeks. The décadi, the "Sunday" at the end of each week, was proposed to be dedicated to the Supreme Being. Services would be held in the "temples of Reason", meaning the old churches, and involve speeches and hymns.
There were also plans for festivals to be held on the anniversary of significant revolutionary events, like the storming of the Bastille.
Source: Albert Mathiez, Robespierre et le culte de l'être suprême, 1910.