Why Is the Most Pornographic TV Show, “Euphoria,” Quoting the Bible So Much?
Why is faith showing up so loud this season?
In the Season 3 premiere (“Ándale”), Rue ends up sheltering with a Christian family in Agua Dulce, Texas after a botched drug run leaves her stranded at the border. She lies and says she’s a college journalist named Ruby writing an exposé on the evil crossing the border. They feed her and let her sleep in the barn.
The father says grace before dinner: “We want to thank you, Lord Jesus Christ, for giving us our daily bread and for giving us our trespasses. And Lord, please God our new friend Ruby and her college newspaper to help expose the pure evil that’s born across our border and poisoning our great nation, the United States of America. Amen.”
Rue is quietly blown away by how peaceful the homeschooled, no-internet family seems. The encounter plants a seed.
Back home, Rue and her sponsor Ali, played by Colman Domingo, sit at the diner and walk through the 12 steps. Rue hits Step 3 and immediately starts auditing the source material.
“Ali, I like girls,” she says. “Well, doesn’t it say that like gays should be put to death or something?” The verses Rue is referencing are Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13:
“Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.”
“If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”
Ali tries to give her the contextual reading. “That was like 3000 years ago,” he tells her. “The Israelites were on the run, ain’t no time for any type of distractions. War ain’t the time for butt sex.”
He lands the real point: “You could spend all day picking apart these books. You either have faith or you don’t have faith, otherwise you can argue about this shit forever.”
Later in the same episode, Rue decides she wants to “make the decision” to believe in God. She puts on an audiobook and listens to Genesis 1:1-3:”In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep. The Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then God said, Let there be light. And there was.”
Seconds later, her dealer Laurie calls and pulls her back into the drug run.
In Episode 3, the wedding episode, the audiobook returns. Exodus 3:2-3 plays during the closing stretch of “The Ballad of Paladin,” after Cassie’s wedding to Nate has unraveled and the season’s violence is closing in, running over the imagery of a DEA bust: “And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush. So he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, but the bush was not consumed. Then Moses said…”