Religious choices are proliferating as conscious choices. Even as they create some of the most intense and hate-filled conflicts in American politics, they’re also a source of creativity; these choices help people shape their identities and form a sense of self. This might include the choice of who to marry, whether to convert, and how to spend a Friday night or Sunday morning. Some face the dilemma of staying in a religion that upholds tenets with which they disagree, or leaving a religion they love. People must decide whether to be public and even political about their faith, or whether to relegate it to the privacy of their home. Even those who feel apathetic about organized religion face daily questions about how to treat others and how to act. Some embrace a kind of secular humanism; this is, itself, a claim that each person can individually determine his or her own code of ethics.

Religious choices can also be a source of anxiety, and not just for the people facing them. The brains of the young sometimes seem packaged in black boxes; experts spend incredible amounts of time picking apart and predicting their decisions. But perhaps no Millennial mystery evokes as much anxiety as their religious beliefs and practices—particularly when it comes to the “nones,” a label that provides excellent fodder for sociology-of-religion puns, if not conceptual clarity.

Viewing youth and religion through this framework, though, may obscure more than it reveals. For one thing, the category can be misleading. People who don’t identify with a particular religious group aren’t necessarily non-religious or non-believers. Many embrace some sort of ritual practice, and relatively few describe themselves as atheists or agnostics. It’s true that a growing number of young people are drifting away from religious institutions, but it’s also true that a significant portion of young Americans still attend worship services, pray, and believe in God. And it’s likely that at least some people will find their way back to church or wherever they may go as they get older: Research suggests that some men and women reconnect with religion when they start going through big life events like getting married and having babies.

The bigger problem with “none-ness” is that it suggests a clean narrative arc for the past and future of religion: an inevitable, measurable decline. If young people don’t care about religion, the thinking goes, that necessarily means the United States will become a much less religious country over time. This is not a new theory; sociologists and historians have been predicting the end of religion for many decades. In the 1950s and ’60s in particular, Western scholars of religion focused on the certainty of secularization, only to see much evidence to the contrary in subsequent decades. From a global perspective, the share of religiously unaffiliated people is expected to decline in the next four decades.