MEDILL NEWS SERVICE
Religious Opposition to Gambling Is Waning
By EMILY DAGOSTINO
MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

WASHINGTON - There's something strange going on when it comes to religion and gambling in America.

Google "church bingo," and more than 100,000 results are returned.

Catholics and Protestants play bingo and play it for money. Religious Americans of almost every stripe bus to Vegas and Atlantic City to try their luck in the casinos' glitter and lights. Summertime's Camptown races call them to the starting gates to place bets on their favorite thoroughbreds. Folks gather around kitchen tables for poker games. Lottery tickets are weekly staples in some circles. Come the Super Bowl, millions put their money down in office pools.

The National Gambling Impact Study Commission recommended in 1999 that expansion of gambling be curtailed pending further research into its social costs. But gambling has continued to spread throughout the country. The commission, mandated by Congress, emphasized the overlooked emotional costs to gambling addicts and their families. It warned that one in five pathological gamblers files for bankruptcy. The same number attempts suicide. Gambling was also linked to divorce, homelessness, and domestic and child abuse, among other things.

A woman from Biloxi, Miss., testified before the commission about her husband's gambling problem: "I lived in fear daily due to his agitation and outbursts of violence, broken doors, overturned furniture, broken lamps, walls with holes in them. I haven't the words to describe the hell that my life became on a daily basis."

Aside from Islam, however, most religions don't prohibit gambling outright. Many Americans even seem to treat gambling as a religion in and of itself.

The National Council of Churches, a league of U.S. Christian denominations, has been fairly outspoken in warning against gambling's evils. For the Catholic Conference of Bishops, however, mum's the word.

Staving off the national pastime was never and still isn't high on the church's priority list, according to Rev. Tom Grey, the nation's top anti-gambling religious leader. The church has played along since the 1960s when financially strapped states began sponsoring lotteries, he said.

"Charitable gambling cracked the door and casinos take the door off," said Grey, who's a United Methodist minister and executive director of the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling.

Cultural acceptance of gambling has since become widespread.

Put 10 bucks on your alma mater for March Madness, the NCAA's annual basketball playoffs, and the most you're likely to get from your minister or rabbi, if anything, is a mild slap on the wrist. There's even a chance they've got their own bets placed.

Make that bet $1,000 you can't afford, however, and stuff starts to get sticky.

It's all fun and games until you bet the mortgage.

In other words, almost all major religions in the United States approach gambling as situational ethics.

No religion champions getting something for nothing. But there's a world of gray area: Taking out a loan to put on lotteries and betting change on bunko games with Grandma are as different as apples and oranges.

Apples or oranges, it's all forbidden fruit, according to a small religious faction in the country. Once you take a bite, you'll forever crave the taste.

The commission reported that 15 million adults and adolescents in America were either pathological or problem gamblers. The downsides for such fanatics and their families were devastating and indicative of a bigger picture, some commission members claimed - one in which America's moral core was under siege.

"Clearly, gambling is a destroyer that ruins lives and wrecks families," said James Dobson, one of the commission's members and founder of Focus on the Family, a nondenominational religious group.

The commission ultimately decided that more research needed to be done before making a conclusive judgment on the social costs of gambling compared to its economic and entertainment benefits.

Meanwhile, its concern and Dobson's message seem to be falling on deaf ears.

Polls conducted for the American Gaming Association, the lobbying group for casinos, indicate about 85 percent of Americans approve of gambling either for themselves or others.

For a certain religious slice of American society, however, all bets are off. Their crusade is small but strong. It's concentrated in state and local pockets of resistance, and Grey insists - contrary to all available evidence - that this year it has helped to keep the gambling empire at bay.

Their message is clear: Gambling is a menace to society and contrary to good government and good economics. It preys upon the nation's poorest, turns people out onto the streets and rips families apart.

"Do we elect government to cannibalize us?" Grey said. "The government is escorting the predator" to the people, he said, and the gambling industry is "making windfall profits and dumping bodies out."

Grey concedes that the vast majority of Americans either gamble or support it.

"Yeah they're doing it," he said. "But they're losing money, and it's not something they can sustain."

He said he's convinced that the trend will ultimately fizzle and the industry, like the tobacco industry, will come under legal attack.

His fellow anti-gambling fighters don't sound so sure of victory.
Cynthia Abrams, an anti-gambling lobbyist for the General Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church, recognized that the American public doesn't think gambling's all that bad. They may not win, but they still like to play.

"States and casino companies have done a great job of advertising it as a recreation, and our society has fallen for that rhetoric," she said.

Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr., CEO of the American Gaming Association, agreed that the industry has done a good job of selling gambling as a recreational pastime and pointed out that most Americans agreed that it is. He respects Grey, he said, but added that the minister and other opponents are fighting a losing battle.

About the only people who've managed to make any significant headway against gambling are, ironically, the same ones who first settled "Sin City" Las Vegas- the Mormons. They've imposed their religious views about gambling on the populace of a whole state - Utah. A stronghold of the Mormon Church of Latter-Day Saints, Utah is one of two states left in the country that doesn't allow gambling. Hawaii is the other one.

Even so, according to Fahrenkopf, Mormons make up about 20 percent of the population of Las Vegas and "most of them work in casinos."

With very little to back up his stance, Grey hasn't lost faith.

"I think we've reached a tipping point," he said. Ten years ago gambling seemed the "wave of the future," he said, but "it doesn't even look desirable now."

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