This article originally appeared as an opinion piece at the Center for Baptist Leadership.1 The original article may be found HERE.2 It is being republished with permission of the author.
It’s time for the SBC to turn resolutions into results in our opposition to online gambling.
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has a storied and commendable history of providing moral clarity to the nation on a variety of ethical issues affecting families, communities, and the church. Dating back over 100 years, this has included the prevalence and threat of institutional gambling.
Records reveal that the SBC has formally opposed gambling since 1890. In 1934, amid the throes of the Great Depression gripping the nation, the SBC gathered in Fort Worth, Texas, for its 79th Annual Meeting. Then, much like today, the Convention focused on missions, evangelism, cooperative programs, and, yes, calling out the threat of prevalent sins that uniquely faced the church and American culture at the time.
Following a long historical trend, the economic situation had prompted conversations among lawmakers about whether legalizing gambling or instituting a nationwide lottery might help fix the broken financial situations facing the nation’s governments. They condemned such considerations, choosing direct and succinct truth over winsomeness or elaborate speech. The 1934 SBC Resolution on Gambling3 read:
“The Southern Baptist Convention hereby deplores the widespread revival of the gambling spirit in our American life and expresses its hearty and unqualified disapproval and censure of all forms of gambling and all games of chance. Hardly anything could be more demoralizing or destructive of all the regular commercial and industrial activities and prosperity of our people, or could more thoroughly debase their morality than a widespread prevalence of gambling. We particularly condemn and protest against the proposal made in the Congress of the United States to set up a great nation-wide lottery.”
But now, with advancements in technology and the emergence of corporate gambling interests bringing the vice to every internet-accessible device across the globe, the SBC must again serve as the faithful friend of American culture and champion for young men that our moment requires.
The SBC must continue to lead the way in combatting online gambling, including its most prevalent form: legalized predatory sports betting.
Thankfully, at the 2025 annual meeting in Dallas, TX, the SBC affirmed a robust resolution naming and denouncing the “Harmful and Predatory Nature of Sports Betting.”4
The resolution denounced “the promotion and normalization of this predatory industry in every athletic context” and expressed the “deep concern regarding its detrimental impact on individuals, families, and communities.” It closed by urging “leaders at all levels of government to curtail sports betting and to address its disastrous effects through policy and legislation” and calling on “Southern Baptist Convention leaders, entities, and pastors to continue to educate our churches on the deceptive sin of gambling through biblical instruction and practical resources while providing compassionate support and counseling to those struggling with gambling addiction and its consequences.”
This was a strong and necessary first step. But there is more work to be done on the ground, in our churches, our states, and our government. SBC entities, leaders, churches, pastors, and congregants need to be equipped and prepared to provide the necessary force for good in the public square to combat predatory gambling in our generation, seize gospel opportunities, and ultimately point the world back to Christ.
The Ubiquitous and Predatory Nature of Online Gambling
The danger posed by online gambling has grown to a scale that would have been difficult to imagine back when Southern Baptists first spoke out against gambling over 100 years ago. International corporations loaded with private equity and the best marketing and government/public relations teams in the world now seek to hook everyone with a mobile device on products made with addiction-by-design.
The entire industry likely spent between $4.5 and $5 billion last year on advertising alone. That amount doesn’t include other efforts to ramp up expansion, such as lobbying, political expenditures, sponsorships, paid partnerships, promotional bonuses, influencer marketing, or fighting legal or regulatory threats. It’s fair to say that, between technological advancements and the sheer volume of money flowing into and through the industry, we face a problem that’s more imminent and significantly more aggressive than ever before.
But just who exactly are we up against, and what exactly are they trying to legalize and expand? The national organization, Stop Predatory Gambling, defines it this way: “Predatory gambling is when powerful corporate gambling interests partner with state governments to use commercialized gambling to exploit and defraud citizens and their communities.”
When the government partners with corporate gambling operators to make money in a rigged system using an addictive product, you’re dealing with predatory gambling. I’m not talking about a friendly wager on a golf course, a March Madness bracket at work, a Friday night game of poker with friends, or even a fantasy football league (although good faith Southern Baptists will disagree on whether even these kinds of friendly wagers are wise).
The online gambling and sports betting system is greed being used to fuel vices and addiction that will result in broken families, financial ruin, and devastating tolls on culture and society as a whole. Prime examples of the kinds of predatory gambling on the rise are state lotteries, regional brick-and-mortar casinos, commercial sports betting, online casinos with slot-style gambling, and prediction markets.
Technological advancements have given them the tools to hone in on precisely the people they want and extract what they can without immediately putting the end user under. It’s parasitical, exploitative, and undignifying far beyond anything the SBCs of old confronted.
The industry is moving from the slot machines and floor games found in brick-and-mortar casinos to every possible virtual presentation of gambling. In fact, the industry is in agreement about leveraging these new digital tools to design more addictive products and include gambling elements in every aspect of life. It dominates sports broadcasts, floods our screens with advertisements, appears on gas-pump screens, blankets many billboards, and even uses gambling-like mechanics in popular video games such as Call of Duty and Fortnite, targeting our youth.
Gambling companies even sponsor tailgates, parties, and campus events to normalize betting among the next generation. In today’s culture, it is difficult to engage in public life without being confronted by gambling promotions, advertisements, or other attempts to entice participation.
How Predatory Gambling Preys on Men
The entire system is designed to lure even well-intentioned men away from the responsibilities to which they are called. Rather than faithfully creating, exercising dominion, and trusting in the Lord’s provision, they are encouraged to respond to economic hardship and the strains of life by seeking the numbing comfort of a dopamine rush, acting out of envy toward their neighbor, and relying on what appears to be a get-rich-quick scheme to get ahead.
These pressures are deliberately exploited to persuade people to take matters into their own hands instead of placing their trust in the Lord’s providence and provision. It exchanges productive labor, the creation of lasting valuables, faithful stewardship of the gifts God has entrusted to us, and loving service to our neighbor for the false promise of easy wealth. In doing so, it encourages us to squander our inheritance and pursue personal gain at our neighbor’s expense.
Predatory gambling creates nothing, serves only the operator long-term, and pits men and women against each other over everything from sporting events to weather, or even foreign policy conflicts. After all, you can “bet on anything” now. But ultimately, the house still wins, and neither party to the wager is better off in the long run. The community isn’t improved, and nothing lasting has been built. This is not what we see in the dominion mandate of Genesis 1.
People Are More Important Than Money
The social costs are staggering. Broken families, increased crime, financial devastation, loss of trust, spiraling sin patterns, addiction, and the devastation of Christian walks are all on the downhill side of our runaway predatory gambling problem. And all for what? For governments and a few major international entities to make more money?
Don’t we believe that people are more important than money?
The effects on people have been devastating. Image-bearers have been relegated to a cog or variable in the equation of some corporate-government business model. Many are left to wallow in an addiction that many consider is even worse than that of pornography or some Schedule I narcotics like cocaine or heroin. Teens and young adults now comprise the largest demographic of gambling help hotlines.
Americans are on track to lose more than $1 trillion over the next five years to state-sponsored gambling operations. Non-gamblers subsidize the fallout through higher taxes and strained social services, meaning “you pay even if you don’t play.” Casinos frequently create more addicts than jobs, and funding promises for things like education or our veterans often amount to accounting shell games. And these numbers and impacts grow worse every year.
From Resolutions to Results
Again, thankfully, the SBC hasn’t been silent on this growing threat. Our opposition to gambling in general and predatory online gambling in particular has been rooted in Scripture and in a fairly balanced allocation of responsibility between the operator and the end user. It has rightfully identified the risks it poses to our young people, particularly our young men. It recognizes the tactics and prevalence of online platforms seeking to overtake us through these massive entities.
But has this been enough?
These have been good and helpful steps to advancing our longstanding history of opposing gambling and its accompanying sins. But in light of these advancements and the snowballing developments of the last few years in the growing industry, the gap between cultural acceptance of this new reality and the void left by our refusal to include what God’s Word says is widening.
It’s time for the SBC to reignite our legacy of speaking clearly and truthfully about predatory gambling in America and around the world. Resolutions provide a vital foundation, but surely our current challenges demand much more.
It’s time to turn the resolutions into results in the public square.
Our pastors should preach boldly and clearly from God’s Word against the sins that tempt people into the predatory gambling trap. Churches must disciple families in financial faithfulness, offer resources to recovery and support for those ensnared, and provide healthy alternatives and accountability for young men to engage in within a local church community. SBC entities, like the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and our seminaries, can expand practical resources, conduct research, and advocate for policies that protect citizens rather than exploit them.
While the predatory gambling industry, the world, the flesh, and the devil do their best to evangelize the world into a hyper-gambling-centric perversion of God’s creation, the SBC, as America’s largest Protestant Christian denomination, should double down on our efforts to publicly oppose predatory gambling, seek to curtail it’s presence in our society, and offer hope and rescue in Christ from those who have been ensared by this vice.
There’s never been a better time than this for the SBC to reignite its legacy of confronting the harms of predatory gambling and to reclaim its mantle as the preeminent protector of the vulnerable in our midst.
This article originally appeared as an opinion piece at the Center for Baptist Leadership. The original article may be found HERE. It is being republished with permission of the author.
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- https://centerforbaptistleadership.org/ ↩︎
- https://centerforbaptistleadership.org/christian-denominations-must-do-more-to-confront-predatory-gambling/ ↩︎
- https://www.sbc.net/resource-library/resolutions/resolution-on-gambling-2/ ↩︎
- https://www.sbc.net/resource-library/resolutions/on-the-harmful-and-predatory-nature-of-sports-betting/ ↩︎
