Pip: A View from the Nest is a blog that looks at faith, culture, and the American moment — and this week, Allen Frederick is asking a question that cuts against the grain of most religious commentary right now.

Mara: The post challenges a widespread diagnosis — that what America is missing is biblical literacy — and argues the real crisis runs deeper than that. Let’s start with what that argument actually looks like.

Mara: The post opens by acknowledging what most commentators say: that America’s cultural collapse traces back to losing the vocabulary of Scripture. Then it pivots — the real problem isn’t that we’ve forgotten the words, it’s that we’ve abandoned the God the words point to.

Pip: And the case doesn’t rest on opinion. The anchor is Hosea, where God tells Israel their destruction came from rejected relationship, not missing information. The post puts it plainly: “The issue was not literacy but lordship.”

Mara: That framing matters because the post immediately applies it to the present: “The United States has more access to Scripture than any nation in history. Bibles fill our shelves, apps fill our phones, sermons fill our feeds, and theological resources are available at the tap of a screen.”

Pip: So if information were the cure, we’d already be cured. The argument is that abundance of text without encounter with the Author produces exactly the condition Jesus diagnosed in the Pharisees — the most biblically literate people of their time, and yet He told them they were missing life entirely.

Mara: The post quotes that confrontation directly: “Ye search the Scriptures… and they are they which testify of Me. And ye will not come to Me, that ye might have life.” The crisis was spiritual, not interpretive.

Pip: Then comes the Saul of Tarsus example, which is the sharpest move in the piece. Trained under Gamaliel, fluent in every theological category — and he used all of it to persecute the Church. Literacy without encounter produced the opposite of faithfulness.

Mara: The post’s diagnosis of the Church follows from that: “We have built churches that teach principles but do not produce disciples.” The concern is that religious environments can inform the mind without transforming the heart.

Pip: Which is, admittedly, a much harder problem to solve than opening a Bible app.

Mara: The post closes with John Adams and Proverbs 14:34 — “Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people.” The argument is that what sustains liberty isn’t institutional religion or even literacy, but hearts genuinely transformed by God.

Pip: The stakes the post names are worth sitting with — a nation can be religious and still be corrupt, biblically literate and still spiritually dead.

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Pip: The distinction between knowing the text and knowing the Author — that’s a tension that doesn’t resolve easily, and it’s the kind of question this site keeps returning to.

Mara: More of that territory next time. Worth watching.