Obviously, sin and cities is an extremely broad topic. A case can be made that every major city in history has had its fair share of sin -- decadence, debauchery, and downright depravity. So we narrowed the field down to nine other world-class sin cities -- historical, contemporary, and even mythical: Rome, Constantinople, and Paris in the distant past; Berlin, Shanghai, and Bangkok in the recent past and present; the biblical Sodom and Babylon; and Gotham, of "Batman" comics and screen.
Of course, a book could be written on this subject; in fact, books have been written on each of these cities. So to limit the time it takes to read this answer to a morning cup of coffee, we'll compare Las Vegas to Sodom, Rome, and Berlin, with a little Shanghai thrown in.
Sodom Sodom could be considered the first great sin city in Western civilization. Its story (and that of its sister-cities Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboim) appears in Genesis, the first book of Moses, as early as Chapter 18. It’s so early, in fact, that the main character, Lot, is the nephew of the great patriarch Abraham himself, the son of his brother.
In Genesis 18, God tells Abraham that He plans to destroy the sinful city of Sodom and all its inhabitants. Abraham essentially plea-bargains the charges down to a commutation of the punishment if 50 righteous people can be found in Sodom, then 45, 30, 20, and finally 10. Two angels manage to locate only one righteous man in Sodom: Lot. So God levels the place.
In what way was Sodom so sinful? This has been a matter of debate among biblical scholars for millennia. Many secular texts specify sexual immorality: homosexuality, bestiality, and incest. Without going into detail, but based on the literal translation of the ancient Hebrew, we conclude that the Sodom story is not about homosexuality, but rather about rape. (Also, bestiality requires a major leap of translation faith, while incest, as we think of it today, is quite common in the Bible.)
However, the classical Jewish interpretation is that the Sodomites were punished for their inordinate greed, the root cause of their other two sins: xenophobia and sadism.
As for the sadism, it’s found in the story of the "rack," the proverbial Procrustian bed in which visitors to Sodom were forced to sleep: If they were too short, they were stretched to fill out the rack; if they were too tall, their legs were cut off to be accommodated by the rack.
In terms of their greed, rabbinic commentary repeatedly affirms that the primary crimes of the Sodomites were economic, both against each other and outsiders. The Sodomites’ lack of compassion and charity was by no means passive, either. The Talmud recounts an incident in which a daughter of Lot gave some bread and water to a poor man who entered the city. When the townspeople discovered her act of kindness, they smeared her body with honey and hung her from the city wall until she was stung to death by bees. This event, in fact, was the final straw for God.
Rome The last (200) years (or so) of the Roman Empire are notorious for their decadence, meaning the weakness and immorality of the Romans. The decadence of Rome is remembered distinctly for its gluttony, casual sex, celebration of death, and absolute corruption of its rulers and lawmakers.
The Romans feasted to the point of sickness. In fact, the famous Roman orgies were infinitely more gustatory than sexual in nature. The orgia referred primarily to extravagant dinner parties thrown by the rich and famous, full of gluttonous eating and binge drinking. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Roman vomitoria, public areas where the partiers could spew their guts with an eye toward making room for more food and wine.
(To be fair, there’s some evidence that, though the Romans weren’t strangers to vomiting -- and we’ve seen references to emetophilia, or sexual arousal in response to vomit or vomiting -- the vomitoria were actually passageways in an amphitheater or arena that led to a tier of seats. The Colosseum in Rome, for example, had 80 vomitoria that could fill and empty the 50,000-seat arena in 15 minutes flat.
It’s indicative of Rome’s priorities that sharing a meal created a form of social relationship with another person, but having sex with that same person didn’t. Indications are that the Romans viewed sex as a basic necessity, unlike the Greeks who viewed it as a pleasurable act or moderns who view it as an expression of love (or are supposed to, anyway). In fact, Romans had plenty of sex with everyone except their husbands and wives. Marriage was a simple contract that in no way required them to love, or make love to, each other. Sex was simply mammalian rutting, primitive urge fulfillment. Money changed hands freely for sex acts, since sex between consenting married adults was considered adulterous only if they weren’t doing it for money! The distinction was crucial, since adultery was a crime for which there was only one punishment: death.
Death due to adultery, however, had more to do with manipulation (the criminalizing of sex) than morality. Roman decadence also encompassed plenty of death. Gladiator hand-to-hand combat, Christians thrown to predatory animals, and dangerous chariot races all served to stimulate the blood lust of the Roman "mob." Gladiators were professional killers who fought to the death either to please the rulers or to earn freedom (anyone forced into slavery who survived three to five years of gladiatorial combat was freed). A defeated gladiator was usually killed by the victor, who plunged a knife into his neck; the audience could grant mercy to a gladiator who put up a valiant fight, though they rarely did.
Finally, if anything symbolized the decadence of Rome, it was the emperors on whose watch it fell. Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Vitellius, among others -- their absolute power and degeneracy knew no bounds.
Here’s one example. Agrippina the Younger poisoned her husband in order to marry her uncle, the emperor Claudius, then convinced him to disinherit his own son (by his former wife Messalina, whom he’d executed for treachery) in favor of her son, Nero. Then she poisoned Claudius so that Nero could inherit the throne. Nero, who’s been called a "feral, sadistic, sexually depraved lunatic," took Agrippina as his lover, but soon tired of her, then tried to poison her, crush her, and drown her, before he finally stabbed her to death with her own knife. And if that’s the way he treated his own mother, you can imagine how he was with everyone else.
Berlin and Shanghai Berlin, post-World War I and pre-World War II, was not only synonymous, it even rhymed, with sin. Scientists actually studied the air there (Berliner Luft, as it was known) for signs of a "toxic ether that stimulated long-suppressed passions as it animated all the tics of sexual perversity." Even the German appetite for war was said to have sprung from this eroticism (a function of the male sexual impulse).
Yes, Berlin was all about sex in its every mode and manifestation. And it was the sex-tourist destination to end all destinations, given the collapse of the German mark. In January 1921, an American dollar bought seven marks; in October 1923, a dollar bought 4.2 billion marks. During the several years of hyperinflation, Germans were so desperate for hard currency that everyone and everything were for sale. In Berlin, you could buy an entire family -- and whatever happened behind closed doors -- for a month for five dollars. Even after the mark stabilized, sexual commerce In Berlin remained one of the world’s great bargains.
In restaurants, German teenage girls competed to strip naked for a few pennies, following the lead of Berlin’s numerous all-nude erotic revues, such as the famous "A Thousand Naked Women!" A dozen major sex zones in the city each had its own distinctive attraction. On these streets, prostitutes ranged from nuttes (boyish teenage girls) and "boot-women" (dominatrixes) to "woodchucks" (women with missing limbs, hunchbacks, and other deformities) and pregnant women (very expensive).
And by no means was the attention focused solely on the female. An estimated 25,000 "line boys" (teenage male prostitutes) plied their trade in Berlin. Other homosexual categories included "doll-boys" (the youngest gay hustlers), "society men" (over 50, outdoorsy, and heavily bearded), "fat daddies," "aunties," homeless "wild boys," and the ever-prevelant "androgyne" transvestites. The sex traffic in men young and old differentiated Berlin from most other centers of decadence through history.
Of course, lesbianism, tranvestitism, pornography, perversion, and sexual violence all had their practitioners and customers. Nudity developed into a mass cultural movement, promoting the cult of the naked human body. This dovetailed nicely with a new brand of science that sought to cloak the debauchery in respectability: sexology.
The scene in Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s was, simply, a clearance sale in human flesh. In the end, one journalist’s conclusion proved to be terminally accurate: "Berlin is a prime breeding ground for evil."
Shanghai in the 1930s took Berlin’s place as the most corrupt and debauched city in the world. It had casinos, brothels, racketeers, narcotics syndicates, gun-runners, underground Communist assassins, national secret agents, torture and assassination, and epic power struggles in the international settlement, especially among the French, the Japanese who brutally controlled the city during the war, and even Jews who took refuge there in the years leading up to the Holocaust. As powerful a Chinese leader as Chaing Kai-shek failed to cleanse the city of its abiding sins. Only Mao Tse-tung, leading a revolution the scale of which still boggles the brain, could subdue it.
Las Vegas Some might argue that Las Vegas shares characteristics of greed with Sodom, though it’s certainly nowhere near as xenophobic or sadistic. And there’s a case to be made that Las Vegas encourages gluttony, though certainly not to the extent of public vomiting. And though sex is ever-present, it barely approaches the depravity of Berlin. As for general reprobacy, we don’t believe that there’s any comparison between gambling and gladiating, sex rags and orgies, or Oscar Goodman and Caligula. In short, as a sin city, Las Vegas comes up a bit tame.
Which might be for the good, considering the outcome of our examples through history; the above sin cities seem to indicate the last throes of civilizations about to collapse under the weight of their own wantonness. Sodom was vaporized. Rome was overrun by barbarians. Berlin gave rise to the Nazis. And Shanghai was crushed by the communists.
We leave it to you to draw your own conclusions about what Las Vegas might foreshadow for the future.
