Is Gambling all that Wrong?
The safest way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket. [Kin Hubbard]
On average, Australians spend nearly 4 per cent of their annual household income on gambling, three-quarters of which gets fed into poker machines. According to the Australian bureau of Statistics, Australians wager on average about $15.50 a week. Around 82 per cent of Australians gamble and 40 per cent of the population does it at least once a week. IN 2005, total gambling turnover in NSW was $54.9 billion, including $5.2 billion on racing and $49.6 billion on all other forms of gambling. Studies suggest that 1.5 to 2.5 per cent of Australians have severe problems with gambling. (That corresponds to an actual figure, based on a population of 20 million people, of 300,000 to 500,000 people.)
What makes gambling 'gambling'? Is there a difference between taking part in the office Melbourne Cup sweep and buying $25 worth of lotto tickets every Tuesday? What about raffle tickets being sold by the local school to raise money for computers? What about investing money in the stock market?
All forms of gambling incorporate a system of redistributing wealth that embodies winners and losers. Money or wealth is willingly taken from one or many and given to another or to a few. There is always at least one loser, and in the case of lotteries or lotto there are many losers. Commonly, chance determines who the winners and losers are. So we may well question whether such a system is morally acceptable from a biblical perspective.
For example, when does a game become gambling? Game theorist Roger Caillois says that games are corrupted when the very real boundary of imagination that defines their terrain and structure is violated. Gambling, he says, is always the murder of a game, because gambling violates the God-created playfulness of the game world, and enslaves fun in the straitjacket of money.
We can watch the way reality changes before our eyes when we stop betting for monopoly money (where the game is constrained) and start to bet with real money (because money acts as a conduit between the game world and the real world).
This logic might give us some clues as to why a small Melbourne Cup pool seems innocuous: it remains a game, because when the stakes stay limited to, say, $2, there's no hope of the stakes rising. So, the conduit to the real world remains quite limited.
Gambling attracts us with the lure of getting something for nothing, thinking that somehow we will be able to beat the odds and come out on top. For some, this becomes all-consuming such that problem gambling is an emotional problem that has financial consequences. It assumes all of the problems of an addictive behaviour—not unlike alcoholism.
It might be argued that losers are paying for a moment of excitement and entertainment, and that excitement and entertainment are legitimate needs in life. But what are the participants excited about and where is the entertainment found? I suspect that greed-- the the hope of disproportionate gain without work—is at the heart of this excitement / entertainment. And it is the activation of latent sin (in this case, greed) in the heart of the gambler that suggests that gambling, even apart from its consequences, ought to be viewed as sinful.
But does the bible actually condemn gambling? What about the practice of 'casting lots' (the main deliberate activity of chance in the Bible), where we hear of a God who knows how lots fall out [Prov 16:33] and who therefore uses the casting of lots for his own purpose [e.g. Lev. 16:8; 1 Chron. 24:5, 31, 25:8, 26:13, Proverbs 18:18, Luke 1:9, Acts 1:26]. Note, however, that no money is involved in these. On the other hand, elsewhere, the enemies of God's people also cast lots. So arguments about 'lots' can go either way: on the one hand, the Bible seems to leave room for doing it (e.g. to solve a problem); but on the other hand it is almost always the enemies of God who use it for material gain.
So we need to tackle the matter by reference to some broader theological principles. Christians know a loving creator whose abundant giving invites thanksgiving and contentment (Jesus persuades us of this in Luke 12:13-34) whereas pagans obsess about wealth because they don't know nor trust this God [cf. Luke 16:13]. Trust that God's provision in this world is sufficient would negate the desire to gamble whereas refusing to trust God's provision would express itself in the desire to gamble— 'I need to get ahead and I need to do it by any possible means, even gambling.'
So Christians detect in the gambler's heart a basic greed that mistrusts the generous provision of God.
These instincts, in addition to the basic requirements of love, leave many of us thinking that we cannot ourselves gamble, because it feels like such a basic betrayal of the Father who cares for us, and as if we might be contributing to the selfish decay of orderly society. We can only ever contemplate light gambling (raffles, Melbourne Cup pools & games) when we seek to participate with people in something for fun, not in order to gain; and even then, we worry that our or other's basic greed circuits will cut in and turn it into something that destroys relationships rather than building them. Even then, we might be concerned about the kind of messages our participation will send.
So gambling has little to commend it to the Christian. Indeed, it preys on our basic human greed and expresses a certain mistrust of God's provision.
This article was inspired by an article by Tracy Gordon of the Social Issues Executive, Diocese of Sydney and borrows some of it's major lines of thought. This article is found at http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/socialissues/