Eric Schliesser at Crooked Timber writes :

Once bible reading and study disappears from bourgeois culture, as it by and large has, the whole network of practices constitutive of the Humanities start to look ridiculous not in a comic sense, but in the more dangerous sense of lacking all intelligibility for most. And this is so because society refuses to develop the skills and cultural practices that provide basic entry into the academic study of texts and practice of criticism. (I don’t mean to be misunderstood on this point: as Zena Hitz shows in her Lost in Thought: the Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life reading of books in solitude can still be highly meaningful to individuals in all kinds of social way.

If we no longer have the life and death need to interpret texts properly so as to discern truth, then why bother? Texts then become a matter of pleasure than rather truth. Once pleasure shows up to the party, pretty much anything goes. Except, if someone hits our car while leaving the party, then we scrutinize those legal texts like a Puritan divine.