Religion is not in decline, though such are the headlines.

The latest Pew Research poll heralding the rise of the “nones” whose religion is, as they answer, “nothing in particular” has spawned, as such polls always do, reports of the demise of religion. An obituary either welcomed or lamented depending, obviously, upon one’s more ultimate opinions. At the very least it’s good media filler, the stuff of clickbait, of Twitter and wasted time.

Now of course, I don’t refute Pew’s findings. The “nones” with their “nothing in particular” are real. The practice of the Christian religion, in whatever form, is rarer today than in the past. The mainline churches are virtually extinct. Among Catholics, mass attendance is but an occasional thing, no matter how obligatory it’s said to be. Even big unaffiliated churches, those charismatic coffee shop cults of personality, are shrinking. Revival, if it exists, is sporadic, isolated. That’s the gist of it, the truth of Pew’s statistics. Churches are fading from the American scene.

And one can easily guess the reasons. Abuse crises, self-serving institutions, denominational infighting, lost cultural relevance: these are the stories of Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians and others. Nothing new, as St. Gregory of Nyssa said centuries ago, the church has often been transferred to the stage and made a laughingstock for just these reasons. Such has been believers’ humiliating lot several times throughout history, to suffer so many bumbling, self-inflicted wounds. It’s not hard to see why people want nothing of these ecclesiastical bodies, many of them now but pathetic spiritual zombies.

But that doesn’t mean religion is declining. We must, at this point, resist the myth of some post-religious, post-faith secular age. There is no such thing. And that’s because human beings can’t help but be religious; it’s simply a question of how. And that is because religion belongs to the order of things, to human existence and orientation. Because we are ineluctably and eternally homo religiosus.

If you’ll allow him, St. Thomas Aquinas helps us here. Religion, he said, is derived from one of two Latin words, reasonably from both: from relegit which means “to re-read” and religare which means “to bind together.” That’s what religion is essentially, the scholastic doctor taught, that which holds our attention (what, in a sense, we re-read) and that which binds us together, which gives structure to our lives. For St. Thomas it was simply a question of what holds our attention and binds us together; that humans must pay attention to something and always seeking structure is part of being human. That’s why there will always be religion; it’s just that St. Thomas thought it better to pay attention to God instead of something else.

And this helps us discover what exactly our religion is and why it’s not in decline. Because it helps us see that, for many, Christianity (or Judaism or Islam or Buddhism for that matter) hasn’t been our religion for quite some time, especially in the West, but something else. But what?

If religion is that which holds our attention and which binds us together, then it’s not Christianity. Christianity today is mostly just sentimentality, escapist devotion, mere identity politics and mere posture. It’s no longer religion in any genuine sense. Because what holds our attention today, what binds us together, are no longer dogma and precepts, but instead all those decadent diversions, customs and conventions of our rich but interiorly vacuous society. This is our religion today: binge-watching Netflix, consumption addictions to various social media, pornography, and the litanies of endless news, fake or otherwise. This is what we relegit, what we re-read, what holds our attention, not God or the good, the true, or the beautiful. This is the new religion, homogenizing imagination and sedating moral impulse, rendering us more pliable to the free movement of capital. This is the economic spirituality of “influence.” This is the theology of advertising.

Likewise, we also see our new religion in what schedules us. No longer rhythmed by the worship of our gods or by the earth’s seasons, now our lives are paced by the quarters of our fiscal year, by our Black Fridays, for instance, and no longer our Thanksgivings. Add to this, especially among the middle classes, the religion of sports, that countless meaningless practices and games now set the schedules for innumerable families, no longer Sabbaths or Sundays or family ties. That is truly religare. This is what binds us, not holy days, rituals or quaint moralities. More than any persecutions, these have displaced the old religions: these new screened, advertised, unstable rites and less any incarnate, old, fickle gods.

And it’s why the question for me is not how we’ll live in some new non-religious world, but about what piety and devotion looks like in this new emerging religion. But of course, this, I admit, I can’t begin to imagine, tied, as I prefer to be, to my ancient God. I just wonder if it will be a religion of charity, a religion that will either cherish or kill the poor. I wonder if it will restore or ruin the earth, if it’s a religion of equality or elites. These are the questions that haunt me as I wonder what the “nones” with their “nothing in particular” will become.

Because they must become something. I’m just frightened by what that may be.

Joshua J. Whitfield is pastoral administrator for St. Rita Catholic Community in Dallas and a frequent contributor to The Dallas Morning News.