Millions of Americans spent some of last weekend watching the series finale to Euphoria. The hbo show drew 8.7 million viewers in the United States in its first three days, and it is averaging more than 20 million viewers per episode globally, more than any other hbo series except one.

According to online summaries, the series involves constant profanity and obscenity, extremely frequent and graphic nudity and nonstop sex, including rape. It is often mixed with abuse and violence. One of the actors who portrays a male pretending to be a female in the show is, in reality, a male who pretends to be a female. Adult characters lead double lives and ignore, prey upon, manipulate, and verbally, physically and sexually abuse teens. The title is a reference to heavy use of opioids, heroin, cocaine, marijuana, alcohol and more. They named the final episode of the final season “In God We Trust.”

And this is all for teens. The main characters of the show, which is rated TV-MA, are teenagers going from one degrading, desperate, tormenting, perverted, mind-killing experience to another, nonstop, no breaks.

And about 1 out of every 40 people in this country watched the finale.

Even on a network infamous for its wanton profiteering off sex and violence, Euphoria has been a phenomenon.

Over its three seasons of dysphoric and anguished darkness, millions of Americans have been watching the brainchild of Sam Levinson, who adapted an earlier Israeli show, Oforia, and said it is largely based on his own experience. He is its creator, primary writer, showrunner and director. In a lengthy Tablet magazine interview, he made no apology for being a superspreader of filth into millions of teens’ minds. He defended himself as merely reflecting America’s spiritual bankruptcy.

Euphoria, he said, “was never merely about Gen Z’s addictions to drugs, sex and social media, but about young Americans left emotionally stranded inside a culture that had lost its capacity for meaning, morality and redemption.”

America is struggling with addictions to drugs, sex and social media, with manipulation and deceit. And it is struggling with entertainments from people like Levinson who spray the worst of that everywhere, amplify the lie that it is normal, and desensitize old and young alike to horrors no one should ever encounter, certainly not because “well, there’s nothing else to watch.” Whether Levinson and the army of actors and creators who made this monster know it or not, Euphoria has served the main purpose of grooming curious American teenagers more and more deeply into profanity, obscenity, fornication, amateur pornography, abuse, hopelessness and mind-blasting substances.

This is a glorification of self-destruction—for teens. The only ones euphoric about what this show and others like it have done to America’s children are those who want them to wallow and drown in sin!

Euphoria has been controversial from the beginning, but Americans have, in effect, settled that controversy by watching it, by the millions.

Ironically, some of the outcry against the series finale—which involved the main character being murdered by a drug dealer using an overdose, someone else killing the drug dealer at a strip club with a shotgun, another drug dealer committing suicide by hanging, and more—is against the fact that amateur pornography, in all its degradation, isn’t portrayed positively! Progressive feminists and actual women who prostitute themselves on websites like OnlyFans—which is mentioned by name in the show (product placement?)—are complaining that it doesn’t show “being a cam girl” as flattering, positive and empowering!

Levinson, like many others in Hollywood who have used the same excuse, is wrong and duplicitous that the show he has just immersed millions of minds in is a true mirror of average America. But he is absolutely right that OnlyFans isn’t fiction; it’s real, and millions of Americans are consuming huge amounts of it. That do-it-yourself pornography platform is still growing. People at home aren’t just watching Euphoria.

If Americans could stop swimming in and drinking in sin for just a minute, Euphoria would have never been conceived, and men like Levinson and their collaborators would be out of a job and perhaps facing much more serious consequences.

But, as he rubs into our faces with this interview, there is a demand. He’s filling it, other directors are filling it, and pornographers—amateur and professional—are filling it.

Television creators like Sam Levinson have figured out how to get millions of people to watch: Don’t avoid the filth. Show the darkest parts of it. And prey on the young ones.

Isaiah 3:9 puts it plainly: “[T]hey declare their sin as Sodom, they hide it not.”

Sodom was a city where people indulged in, tolerated, then succumbed to widespread sexual perversion. And they were proud of it. God saw that pride and literally destroyed it with fire from heaven.

The ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah became as vile as Sodom in the days before their captivity. This is why the Prophet Isaiah said that Israel declared “their sin as Sodom.” The Prophet Jeremiah later said that the inhabitants of Judah had forgotten how to blush (Jeremiah 6:15).

Americans have directly replaced shame for sin with outright celebration of it.

Euphoria’s creator says he was just telling the truth about a sick generation—while he proudly takes credit for representing the worst, vile filthiness in America so accurately. He used the language of sickness, abandonment and spiritual emptiness while creating sickness, abandonment and emptiness.

The cure to America’s sickness requires acknowledging that the sickness has a cause, and the cause is the rejection of God’s law. Herbert W. Armstrong wrote about this extensively in The Missing Dimension in Sex. He did not list the family as one institution among many responsible for civilization. He said that the family is the bedrock of every stable civilization that has ever existed. When it cracks, everything built on it cracks. The drug addictions, the pornography economy, the children abandoned to screens—these are not isolated failures. They are the result of a society that dismantled the family and called it progress.

The Prophet Malachi closes the Old Testament with a warning and a promise. God declares He will send an end-time Elijah “before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord” (Malachi 4:5). The mission of that Elijah is precise: “And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse” (verse 6). The turning of hearts is the solution.

“In God We Trust” finishing off Euphoria punctuates the real-life cravenness, mendacity, abuse and hopelessness killing America. It is a reminder that we are drowning in sin. Shut off the television, put down the phone, and turn to something that will not only explain why America is so wretched in its sexuality but will also give you hope. Read The Missing Dimension in Sex, by Herbert W. Armstrong.