Judith Butler on Religion

"It makes a different kind of sense to refer to a secular Jew than to a secular Catholic; while both may be presumed to have departed from religious belief, there may be other forms of belonging that do not presume or require belief; secularization may well be one way that Jewish life continues as Jewish. We also make a mistake if religion becomes equated with belief, and belief is then tied to certain kinds of speculative claims about God […] That effort to distinguish the cognitive status of religious and nonreligious belief misses the fact that very often religion functions as a matrix of subject formation, an embedded framework for valuations, and a mode of belonging and embodied social practice."

Judith Butler, "Is Judaism Zionism?" in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 72.