The national sports betting honeymoon is coming to a close. On May 14, 2018, a Supreme Court decision opened the doors for states to legalize sports betting. Seven years and nearly $500 billion in bets later, lawmakers are beginning to wonder what exactly they have unleashed. Studies show that a state’s legalization of online sports betting is associated with increased bankruptcies and reduced savings, especially for low-income households. Emerging evidence points to rising rates of problem gambling, particularly among young men.
It might be premature to say that the political tide is turning against gambling, but the momentum is beginning to change. Congress is considering a bill that would rein in sports betting, and industry observers believe federal regulation of some kind is “inevitable.” States as varied in their politics as Kansas, Maryland, and Maine have considered tightening up their regulations to curb the betting free-for-all. They are doing so at the behest of public health advocates, lawmakers who want a bigger cut of the revenue, and even the NCAA, which is worried about angry bettors berating its athletes.
But a curious feature about the sports gambling backlash is not who is involved but who is not involved: Christians, more specifically Protestants, even more specifically conservative evangelicals. For most of the twentieth century, a crusade against legalized gambling was a huge part of the religious right’s political efforts. That crusade has disappeared. What happened to it? Is there any chance it will come back? The success of the campaign for a safer sports betting setup could hinge on the answer.
It bears stating at the outset that there is no biblical prohibition against gambling. To the contrary, the Old and New Testaments are full of lot-casters, including Roman soldiers who, according to Matthew 27, held a lottery at the foot of the cross to determine the recipients of Jesus’s garments.
Over the millennia, the Christian appetite for betting soured. Theologians argued that gambling tried to provide an alternative to God’s will, amounting, therefore, to idol worship. And even if gambling itself was not ungodly, the results were: gambling preyed on the poor and compelled them to abandon their familial responsibilities and the work ethic in pursuit of a lucky windfall.
In the United States, the puritanical streak against gambling began with the actual Puritans, who enacted an anti-gambling statute in Massachusetts in 1638. Gambling settled into a consistent pattern: periods of legalization were followed by religious blowback and prohibition, as during the Second Great Awakening and the Progressive Era. Then the fervor would die down, the games would come back, as would, eventually, the fervor.
Notably, religious blowback came almost entirely from Protestants. Catholics have long approved of betting (in moderation), and American Catholic churches relied on bingo games to fill their coffers. In the 1950s, debates over the legalization of charity bingo games devolved into clerical squabbles between supportive Catholics and oppositional Protestants. The Catholics won.
The bingo debates were a warm-up for the fight over the enactment of state lotteries. The first modern state-run lottery began in New Hampshire in 1964. The games spread across the Northeast and Rust Belt in the 1970s—the Catholic share of a state’s population is a predictor of how early it adopted a lottery—then the West in the 1980s, reaching the South in the 1990s and 2000s.
These were the same decades when conservative Protestants were finding their political footing, most famously through organizations like Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. And the religious right went all in on the fight against lotteries. In nearly every state, church groups rose up in opposition to the proposals. In some places, individual churches worked independently. In others, religious leaders formed statewide organizations. The Methodist minister who led an anti-lottery organization in California in 1984 explained, “There is more agreement among Protestant groups on the adverse effect of gambling than on any other social issue, including the issues of abortion, alcohol, and homosexuality.” Protestants may have agreed on gambling, but because it was a state-level issue—unlike, say, abortion—it remained out of the national spotlight. Still, gambling was treated like a major battle in the culture wars. A member of a Methodist congregation in Warrenton, Georgia, wrote his state representative in 1989 about a lottery proposal: “NOTHING LESS THAN OUR WAY OF LIFE IS AT STAKE!”
For most of the twentieth century, a crusade against legalized gambling was a huge part of the religious right’s political efforts.
Anyone who has ever been to a convenience store knows how this story ends. Lottery opponents lost over and over again. Lotteries spread to forty-five states between 1964 and 2018 (Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, and Utah are the holdouts). As lotteries spread, they set the stage for commercial (non-tribal) casinos, which can now be found in twenty-one states. Some lottery votes were extremely close, and lottery opponents picked up a few wins, most notably in Alabama in 1999. But other victories were fleeting, as rejected lottery proposals in Washington, D.C., North Dakota, and Arkansas were approved on subsequent attempts.
While the histories of the debates over abortion and homosexuality illustrate the political strength of the religious right in the late twentieth century, gambling offers a different story. Evangelicals lost in large part because state-run gambling split the emerging conservative coalition. The religious right drew support from a broad group of fellow travelers that, in places like California, included voters of indeterminate religious devotion but determined devotion to small government, or at least small tax bills. Legalized gambling, though, is a libertarian’s dream: a way to authorize an irrepressible human activity and raise money for the government without compulsory taxes. When faith competed with finance at the ballot box, voters’ wallets had the final word.
Evangelical leaders seem to have learned their lesson: gambling was unquestionably against their values, but it was a losing issue, one on which they were out of step with the voting public. So while institutions like the Southern Baptist Church officially oppose gambling, gambling is diminished as a political issue compared to causes on which churches are more in line with their adherents and the broader public. Preferable to let betting dogs lie.
In the United States, the puritanical streak against gambling began with the actual Puritans, who enacted an anti-gambling statute in Massachusetts in 1638.
This history explains why there has been so little religious opposition to the emergence of sports betting, and why this lack of opposition is basically unprecedented in American history.
Some mitigating factors explain the Christian quiet on this issue. Numerous states ushered in gambling legislation quickly, some under intense lobbying pressure from the gaming industry, and in some cases during the COVID-19 pandemic when states were especially eager for new sources of revenue. Churches, like many lawmakers, may have simply been caught flat-footed by the speed with which sports betting swept the nation.
Still, the religious right has missed opportunities to slow down sports betting. Ballot measures squeaked by in Colorado in 2019 and Missouri last year. The Colorado referendum had no organized opposition, and the opposition campaign in Missouri was supported entirely by in-state casino interests. Gambling has long made for strange bedfellows, and even modest organized religious opposition could have swung both of these elections in the other direction.
The political willpower is not there yet for serious reforms to the sports betting infrastructure. In the United Kingdom, now entering its third decade with legal online gambling, an ongoing national reckoning was partly inspired by suicides of people with gambling addictions (gambling is the addiction with the highest correlation to suicide). Hopefully, American lawmakers get their act together before such stories begin to emerge on this side of the Atlantic.
The current sports betting setup is doing real harm and needs to be reformed. The absence of traditional moral watchdogs has left a rhetorical vacuum that has allowed gambling to rapidly become normalized, with dangerous consequences, particularly for young men. Gambling is as much a part of the political history of the religious right as other, better-known issues. Particularly with unified Republican control of Washington, evangelical leaders have a unique opportunity to put sports betting on the map politically. The religious right has a choice: it could either stay silent on sports betting (effectively changing centuries of church doctrine on gambling) or speak up in accordance with its values.