Netflix has a new star. Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the fourth season of a true-crime series, brings the 1892 Fall River ax murders to screens around the world. Netflix isn’t just telling the story and making a profit. It’s celebrating mass murder. Here’s one promotional summary:

• “The killings give birth to an icon who breaks out of her cage and writes her own legend. Shocking, monstrous and gloriously free.”

Netflix considers a woman murdering her own father and stepmother with 28 swings of an ax worth re-creating with millions of dollars paying an army of actors, cameramen, cosmetologists, set builders, lawyers, video editors and scriptwriters who make a demonic murderer “relatable.” And Netflix promoters and advertisers want you to think it involves glory and freedom.

This isn’t an obscure corner of the culture. It’s the mainstream.

• The Monster season on the cannibalistic murderer Jeffrey Dahmer passed 1 billion viewing hours and reached Netflix’s all-time top 10.
• Critics hated the season on serial killer Ed Gein—but audiences pushed it to No. 1 in more than 60 countries anyway.
• The creators are already working on re-creating the next “monster.”
• Plenty of people, if you ask, now have a favorite serial killer.

This is extraordinary moral depravity. We’ve reached the point of glorying in the most patently vile works of the devil.

The fruit: Is it any surprise what our streets look like?

• Chicago: A man with a long criminal record allegedly murdered a transit worker. He is reportedly the 17th person this year accused of killing or trying to kill someone while out on felony pretrial release.
• Philadelphia: A gunman with a record going back to 2012 allegedly ambushed police, killing one officer. A second officer was shot 12 times.
• Virginia: A 6-year-old who stole his mother’s gun took it to school and shot his teacher. Police body-camera footage shows him afterward cursing at officers: “If you want a piece of me, come get it all.”

That child wasn’t born that way. Criminal behavior is learned, absorbed from the home, the neighborhood and—if you are not constantly at war against it—the entertainment.

God’s law of cause and effect is simple: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap” (Galatians 6:7). We are sowing violence in our entertainment and refusing to punish it in our courts. So we can expect to continue reaping more of it.