The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

Sports gambling involves wagering on sports outcomes, transformed by the 2018 Supreme Court ruling into a legal, universally accessible, and rapidly growing industry in over 35 US states. Popular platforms like DraftKings, FanDuel and BetMGM offer extensive mobile betting on leagues like the NBA, NFL, and soccer. However, this boom has sparked concerns regarding high-risk bets, such as parlays, and rising financial issues like credit delinquency among bettors. The danger of sports gambling especially concerns young men.

Christian attorney and columnist David French recently highlighted this concern: “What is the problem? We are making virtue more difficult and vice easier to access. By the time young men enter adulthood, they’ve been conditioned by a world that makes it ever easier to place a bet and harder to go to college. It’s easier to watch porn and more difficult to form real relationships. And the social results of this gigantic national experiment are exactly what you’d expect them to be.”

French makes these additional observations:

• The scale of the business has also exploded. Gross gaming revenue from sports betting in the U.S. (the amount of money wagered, minus winnings) has increased from roughly $400 million in 2018 to almost $17 billion in 2025, with gamblers betting a total of nearly $167 billion on athletic contests.
• A Siena Research Institute/St. Bonaventure University study recently released found that a stunning 52 percent of men aged 18-49 have an account with an online sports book, and 31 percent of bettors overall had someone express concerns to them regarding their use of online sports books.
• The social costs are extraordinary. A Maryland study found that 19.8 percent of sports bettors in the state engaged in “disordered gambling,” with an additional 31 percent of gamblers deemed at risk. That means half of all sports gamblers were either problem bettors or at risk of becoming problem bettors. Other studies found that people with gambling addictions had the highest rate of suicide compared with people with other addictions; another study found a “substantial increase in average bankruptcy rates, debt sent to collections, use of debt consolidation loans, and auto loan delinquencies” in states after they legalized online sports betting.
• The rise of prop bets—“proposition” bets that permit a gambler to bet in real-time on in-game events (whether a pitch will be a ball or a strike, for example)—has had a particularly pernicious impact. Such bets have a kind of slot-machine effect that glues bettors to their phones during games.
• It should surprise no one that we’ve also seen a number of indictments and suspensions of professional athletes and coaches who’ve either gambled themselves or rigged bets during games. It should also surprise no one that athletes experience gambling-related harassment, as disappointed gamblers pour out their frustration on the players and coaches who cost them money.

French recently participated in a debate with former New Jersey Governor, Chris Christie, on the topic, “Is sports betting the new pornography?” There is an excellent reason to bring pornography into the conversation, he argued. “Like gambling, it’s an ancient vice that is much, much easier to indulge than it used to be even in the relatively recent past. Consider this: The age of first exposure to pornography among boys is in their preteen years, with one study finding an average age of roughly 13 years old, and the types of pornography many boys are exposed to are often dark and depraved, beyond any decent person’s imagination . . . In an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court in 2024, two scholars who’ve studied the effects of pornography on the brain wrote that pornography addiction can cause ‘disproportional cue reactivity, a dampening effect on the ability to receive and process pleasure and structural changes to the brain itself’ and that adolescence is ‘the exact worse time for someone to be exposed to pornography. ‘Put another way, at the precise time when young men and boys struggle the most with sensation-seeking and impulse control, our culture and economy has handed them a device that can function as a porn theater and a casino at the same time.”

During his debate with Governor Christie, he discussed the concept of “Chesterton’s Fence:” The concept comes from G.K. Chesterton, the renowned Christian writer. Imagine that you come across a fence or a gate that’s blocking your path. Annoyed, you start to knock it down. But before you knock down the fence, Chesterton argues, you need to know why the fence exists. Sure, it may need to be destroyed but be careful before you do so. A simple way of stating the concept is that you must understand why a rule exists before you destroy the rule. And there has long been a fence around the gambling industry . . . [But] beginning in 2018, America bulldozed the fence around the gambling industry. It had destroyed the fence around the pornography industry decades before. We tore down the fences we should have preserved, and elsewhere we built fences we never should have constructed.”

America is the land of liberty, but not all liberties are of equal value. The Bill of Rights is the foundation of American freedom, but beyond those indispensable liberties, not every right is of equal value. When it comes to the virtues and vices that define our lives, “it’s worth remembering that the freedom to build is infinitely more valuable than the freedom to destroy.”  There is no greater example of the “freedom to destroy” than the panacea of sports gambling.

As a Christian, how should I think about gambling, even gambling in a larger sense beyond simply sports gambling. Can I build a case against gambling?

First of all, a few thoughts on gambling as a goal of public policy. It seems to me that immoral means have never led to moral ends. We are no longer skimming the profits from criminal activity; we are putting the full force of government into the promotion of moral corruption. Quite frankly, gambling promotion has become a key to many states balancing their respective budgets. But it is wrong for the state to exploit the weakness of its citizens just to balance the budget. It is the most unfair and sorrowful form of “painless” taxation. The money is not coming from a few big bookies but from the pockets of millions of its citizens. The states have become as hooked on gambling as a source of revenue as any compulsive gambler betting the milk money. Gambling feeds a get-rich-quick illusion that debilitates society, and thereby causes individual ruin, despair and suicide. Therefore, gambling corrupts the state and its citizens that both seek “a piece of the action.”

Second, how does state-approved gambling impact peoples’ lives?

1. Legalized gambling sidetracks a great deal of money.  The amounts that people spend on gambling equals or exceeds the total amount given to religious organizations and/or the total amount spent on elementary and secondary education.
2. Legalized gambling handicaps a lot of people.  The number of compulsive gamblers in the US is about 5 to 7 % of the population and growing.  Gambling behavior is usually associated with poverty, marital strife, job loss, homelessness, and hunger.
3. Legalized gambling victimizes vulnerable members of society—women, youth and ethnic minorities.
4. State-sponsored gambling also seems to break down the resistance of people who would not otherwise gamble.  Gambling addiction has risen precipitously since legalized gambling began several decades ago.
5. State-sponsored gambling has promoted materialism and the fantasy of a life of luxury without labor.

Third, it is difficult to fit gambling into the Christian worldview and the ethical system it includes. There are a number of reasons for its rejection:

1. Gambling encourages the sin of greed and covetousness.
2. Gambling promotes the mismanagement of possessions entrusted to us by God.
3. Gambling undermines absolute dependence on God for His provision.
4. Gambling works at cross purposes with a commitment to productive work.
5. Gambling is a potentially addictive behavior.
6. Gambling threatens the welfare of our neighbor.

In short, it is difficult to view gambling—private or state-sponsored—as ethically virtuous. It is one of the most telling signs of a dysfunctional civilization in decline; one of the more discouraging aspects of our Postmodern culture that exalts personal autonomy and personal freedom. Nonetheless, both individuals and the respective states pursue it with passionate enthusiasm and boundless obsession. There is no greater sign of cultural declension than that.

See David French, “America’s view of liberty is upside down” in the New York Times (15 April 2026); Russell Moore in Moore to the Point (22 April 2026).