The preacher called the city a modern Sodom and Gomorrah.
Sodom and Gomorrah
idiomA place or scene of extreme wickedness, vice, and moral ruin.
Origin
Genesis 18 and 19 tell of two cities on the plain whose wickedness had, in the text's phrasing, become so great that God resolved to destroy them. Abraham bargains for their survival, but not even ten righteous inhabitants can be found, and the cities are consumed by fire and brimstone from the sky.
The names became a fixed byword long before English existed, carried through Latin and the church into every European vernacular as shorthand for a society rotten past saving.
Today Sodom and Gomorrah names any place given over to conspicuous vice and excess — usually with a note of impending reckoning, since in the original the depravity and the destruction are inseparable.
To their scandalised relatives, the resort town was a Sodom and Gomorrah of cheap liquor and all-night parties.
The tabloids painted the finance district as a Sodom and Gomorrah of greed and self-indulgence, conveniently forgetting that they had profited from every excess they now condemned.
Genesis after Eden: Noah and the flood, Babel, Sodom, and the patriarchs.
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two by two (idiom)
In pairs, one alongside another.
- 02
Tower of Babel (idiom)
A grand, over-ambitious project that collapses into confusion and a breakdown in communication.
- 03
a pillar of salt (idiom)
The fate of someone who cannot stop looking back at the past instead of moving forward.
- 04
Jacob's ladder (idiom)
A link between the earthly and the heavenly, or by extension a long, steep climb.
- 05
a coat of many colors (idiom)
A conspicuous mark of favouritism that stirs up envy in others.
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old as Methuselah (idiom)
Extremely old; ancient.