America’s real crisis is biblical illiteracy: A civilizational problem.
As America approaches its 250th anniversary, the nation finds itself preoccupied with familiar concerns: political polarization, civic deterioration, institutional distrust, and cultural fragmentation. These are serious realities, but they are not ultimate ones. They are symptoms of a deeper disorder—biblical illiteracy.
I have become increasingly convinced that the central problem confronting both church and culture is not merely moral rebellion against biblical truth, but widespread unfamiliarity with it. We see this in public officials who invoke God in the language of prosperity, national sentiment, or self-affirmation rather than repentance, moral accountability, and divine authority. We see it in podcasters, influencers, and media personalities who handle Scripture with confidence but little theological discipline. We see it in Christian audiences so uninitiated that charisma, sentiment, and ideology are often mistaken for sound doctrine. The issue is no longer simply that Scripture is denied. It is that Scripture is often no longer known with sufficient depth to be interpreted responsibly, rejected intelligently, or applied coherently.
This is a more profound crisis than open opposition. A society that consciously rejects truth still acknowledges its existence. A society that has lost the categories necessary to understand truth has entered a far more precarious condition.
Biblical illiteracy, therefore, is not a peripheral church problem. It is a civilizational one. The American experiment did not arise in a moral vacuum, nor was it sustained by constitutional procedure alone. While the Founders did not establish a confessional state, they operated within a moral framework deeply shaped by biblical assumptions about human nature, justice, sin, restraint, authority, duty, and accountability. Scripture furnished not only private devotion, but also a shared moral vocabulary through which public life could be understood.
That vocabulary once supplied a grammar for ordered liberty. Concepts such as freedom, responsibility, virtue, truth, and judgment were grounded in a larger moral order. John Adams captured this principle clearly when he wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” His point was structural: constitutional self-government requires a citizenry formed by moral conviction, and such conviction cannot be sustained where Scripture has become unknown.
The erosion of biblical literacy carries consequences well beyond the Church. When a people lose familiarity with the biblical world of meaning, they do not merely lose theological competence. They lose the conceptual architecture that once made moral reasoning intelligible. They may continue to invoke the language of liberty while severing it from the moral restraints and transcendent obligations that gave it coherence. What remains is freedom emptied of purpose, rights detached from responsibility, and public discourse increasingly incapable of distinguishing justice from sentiment or authority from will.
This helps explain the magnitude of the present confusion. We are not simply witnessing cultural change. We are witnessing moral and theological disintegration. Data from the State of Theology and similar studies suggest that large numbers of self-identified Christians now affirm claims fundamentally at odds with historic Christian orthodoxy. This is not a marginal anomaly. It is evidence of doctrinal erosion significant enough to shape both ecclesial life and public witness.
Where biblical literacy declines, confusion does not remain theoretical. It becomes formative.
Its effects are visible throughout the public square. Questions of justice, human dignity, freedom, sexuality, authority, and national purpose are increasingly debated in terms detached from any stable moral ontology. Competing ideologies rush to occupy the vacuum—moral relativism, expressive individualism, and therapeutic visions of the self that offer counterfeit meaning while rejecting the theological foundations that once ordered moral judgment. In such a climate, the Church is hardly immune. Shallow preaching, weak catechesis, and the prioritization of relevance over doctrinal seriousness have left many Christians without the framework necessary to recognize error, much less refute it.
More concerning still is the fact that Scripture is now routinely conscripted into public argument by voices who handle it without theological fidelity, historical awareness, or interpretive rigor. Passages are abstracted from context, repurposed to ratify contemporary moral intuitions, and presented as though sentiment were an adequate substitute for exegesis. In this environment, biblical language remains publicly useful even as biblical meaning is steadily evacuated from it.
For that reason, the answer to the present crisis is a recovery of Scripture as Scripture: not as civil religion, partisan ornament, or a reservoir of selectively quoted affirmations, but as the authoritative Word of God, rightly handled and faithfully taught. The Church must recover the whole counsel of God. Christians must once again become a people formed by the text, governed by its categories, and trained in theological discernment. Those of us in Christian media bear a particular obligation here. What we platform and normalize will either clarify biblical truth or contribute to its further confusion.
As the nation approaches this historic anniversary, the central question is whether the country still possesses the theological and moral vocabulary necessary to sustain the freedoms it so confidently celebrates. For when a people forget Scripture, they do not merely lose a religious inheritance. They lose the interpretive framework by which truth, liberty, virtue, and judgment can be rightly understood.
Troy A. Miller is the President & CEO of NRB.
