The music of a period mirrors the spirit of its time, revealing the morals, moods, and desires of those who create and consume it. Today's popular songs among young Americans often glorify sex, rebellion, violence, and feelings of exclusion or marginalization, signaling a continued societal decline since the 1960s. This trend is evident even in Christian circles, where contemporary services feature rock music instead of traditional hymns, and missionaries abroad use such music in their efforts, often to the dismay of older generations who find the combination inappropriate. In biblical examples, music is often melodic, uplifting, and instructive, with songs like those in the Psalms praising God and His works, family life, and godliness while denouncing evil. Amos criticizes Israel's chants as being influenced by alcohol, overindulgence, violence, and lax standards during times of abundance, suggesting a divine preference for music that reflects God's character and standards of quality.

Israelitish culture forms the foundation of Western civilization, which dominates North America, Europe, Australia, and similar regions because these areas were colonized largely by Israelitish peoples whose habits shaped local societies. Most who inhabit these nations were born into them and therefore remain culturally insulated, experiencing other cultures only superficially through brief travel or media. This produces a strong bias that favors the Israelitish pattern of highly individualistic, free, independent, structured, and technologically advanced life while regarding it as superior. Earlier Hebrew culture placed heavy emphasis on honor and shame together with tribal, national, and conventional loyalties, yet by the first century Jewish practice had shifted toward an increasing focus on the minutiae of law and command, introducing a pronounced guilt-and-innocence orientation. Biblical cultures therefore appear strange to modern Israelitish readers, who would feel like fish out of water if transported into patriarchal clan life under Abraham, tent-dwelling under Moses, the unsettled period of the judges, the mixed monarchy, post-exilic imperial rule, or the Judeo-Hellenistic-Roman setting of the first century. The same three cultural paradigms visible in Scripture persist today, but Israelitish readers are intimate only with their own guilt-and-innocence lens and merely familiar with the other two, causing Scripture to be read somewhat myopically. God nevertheless embedded language and narratives that address all three paradigms so that anyone, regardless of cultural background, can grasp His Word.

The Israelitish nations (the United States, Britain, Canada, France, and others) hold a culture that is different from the cultures of the Gentile peoples now streaming into them. That difference is real but not a matter of innate superiority. Israel is holy, meaning different and a cut above, only because God has given it His Word, which shapes how Israelites think, imperfectly though they follow it. Religion is the most powerful influence shaping a nation's culture, and what a people worships, it becomes. Language communicates culture, so the many tongues now heard within Israelitish borders signal the arrival of foreign cultures, which work like leaven in dough. Deuteronomy 28:43-49 treats the rise of the stranger within the gates as a curse for disobedience. God does not want cultures mixed, because diverse cultures cannot be put together and expected to get along. Mixing leads Israelites, who are fascinated by what others do, into idolatry and further sin. The 1965 Immigration Reform Act opened the door, and the results include economic burdens, higher crime, and a loss of pride in national heritage, replaced by political correctness. Islamic culture, sharing almost nothing with Israelitish culture, poses the greatest threat. God's people must not be unequally yoked with unbelievers, but must live separate from the world, because their citizenship is in heaven.

God spiritually calls Jerusalem "Sodom and Egypt," and because He uses the city to represent the whole nation, the titles fit every Israelitish people, including the United States, Britain, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and the nations of northwestern Europe. Sodom stands for vileness, especially sexual immorality, and Egypt stands for slavery to sin and to Satan. The condition is not confined to America. Britain's murder rate now exceeds America's, muggings are more likely in London than in any American city, and the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands are loose in sexual matters. In America a huge hidden economy flourishes beneath a respectable surface. Marijuana, pornography, and illegal labor make up as much as 10% of the economy. Marijuana is a bigger cash crop than corn, and about three million Americans grow it, many of them seemingly ordinary farmers leading double lives. Pornography earns as much as Hollywood's domestic box office, and Americans spend more at strip clubs than on Broadway, regional theater, and orchestras combined. The United States leads the world in exporting explicit videos. Pornography websites have grown from about 22,000 to about 300,000. Respectable businessmen break the law by hiring illegal workers because it is cheaper. The Israelitish nations are being destroyed from within, and God rightly calls them Sodom and Egypt.

American culture is far from righteous, and God is amply justified in chastising the nation. God is not a distant observer who lets humans run wild over the earth. He watches, tests mankind against His standards, and responds accordingly: to the righteous He extends loving kindness and blessing, but to the evil He sends punishment in various forms of destruction. He does not let decadence have the upper hand for long, as Sodom and Gomorrah show (Genesis 19). Islamic terrorists bear most of the blame for September 11, 2001, and their guilt is easy to place. Yet Americans share in the blame, because the nation's decadent culture left it open to God's correction. The remaining question is whether the nation has learned the lessons of that chastisement.