Will gambling lose its popularity? Don’t bet on it

Christians generally agree about gambling, but they seldom say much on the topic

People wearing long-ago Chicago White Sox baseball uniforms emerge from a cornfield. They are reenacting the famous scene in the 1989 movie Field of Dreams in which eight professional players, who were banned from the game for life due to their involvement in gambling, show up wanting to play again.

People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. —1 Timothy 6:9

On the first Monday since completing my series of posts from Burundi, I will try to be gently provocative on a topic about which Christians usually agree but don’t do very much: gambling.

The corruptive influence of gambling has been big news in the United States recently. On October 23, three people involved in the National Basketball Association, including current player Terry Rozier, were arrested on illegal gambling charges. Among the prosecutors’ claims, Rozier is accused of telling a friend in advance that he would remove himself from a game that night due to an injury.

The friend told others to bet that Rozier would score fewer points than his average that night. (Due to the proliferation of sports gambling, you can place “prop bets” on innumerable things, such as how many points a given player will score, and not just on who will win the game.)

Rozier was averaging 21 points per game, but that night he played only 10 minutes, scoring 5 points. Rozier’s friends allegedly made thousands of dollars on their bets.

Earlier this month, two baseball pitchers were charged with telling gamblers how they would perform on specific pitches so that they could win lots of money.

Corruption of professional sports due to gambling is nothing new. In 1919, eight Chicago White Sox players participated in a conspiracy to lose the World Series—the annual championship of US professional baseball—in exchange for handsome payments. The players were acquitted of criminal charges but were permanently banned from baseball. Their role in the so-called “Black Sox” scandal has attracted ongoing fascination, such as in the classic 1989 movie Field of Dreams. In this movie, a farmer feels compelled to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield, and after he does so, the eight banned Black Sox show up asking to play.

So everyone knows that gambling corrupts sports. But money talks. And big money talks very loudly.

Throughout my younger years, the only legal gambling in the US took place in the state of Nevada or in Atlantic City, New Jersey. However, native Americans claimed the right to legalize gambling on sovereign tribal lands, causing the US Congress to pass the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988. After that, casino interests began lobbying US states to legalize gambling for them too.

As an opponent of casino gambling, I quickly found that I was fighting a cabal of three powerful partners: the casinos, lobbyists (who were paid handsomely by the casinos), and politicians (who saw casino revenue as an attractive way to fund government without having to raise taxes). Objections that (except where casinos can attract large numbers of tourists) gambling just circulates local money without supporting the economy, puts gigantic profits in the hands of casino owners, and constitutes a regressive tax on the poor and gullible fell on deaf ears.

In 2018, the US Supreme Court struck down a law prohibiting states from authorizing sports gambling. Today, 38 of the 50 US states have legal sports betting, and professional leagues get lots of promotional money from companies that offer sports gambling.

Of course, the scourge of gambling is virtually ubiquitous. More than 80 percent of the world’s countries have some form of legalized gambling, and people in the other 20 percent of countries can gamble online.

In my experience, relatively few Christians care about this problem, unless it directly affects them.

If you want to have a betting pool with some friends and can do so without creating hard feelings or putting the loser’s family members at risk, go ahead. In such friendly bets, all the money stays within the group, unlike casino gambling where the house always wins. However, for many people, gambling—whether on sports events, at slot machines, or in lotteries—reflects an unhealthy and self-defeating dream of becoming rich in a magical fashion rather than through diligent work.

We should recognize that although most gamblers, like most drinkers, can control themselves, a significant minority fall prey to addiction, causing great harm to their family members and communities. Older people with relatively few social connections are especially susceptible. In my personal visits to casinos, I’ve seen more elderly people mindlessly spinning the levers on slot machines non-stop than I care to remember.

Where a family member or friend seems to have unexplained money problems, I would encourage you to take a closer look. Once I surreptitiously followed my mother when she went for a medical appointment, to make sure that she wasn’t dropping in at the nearby casino. (We subsequently discovered that her money problems were due to credit card debt.)

Gambling is a topic that none of us should ignore, even if we ourselves are not susceptible.