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Sometimes a guest says something that goes by in the moment but that I can’t stop thinking about later. Earlier this week, I recorded a conversation with McKay Coppins of The Atlantic about his essay on what it was like to spend a year doing online sports gambling. You can listen to our conversation next week on my podcast, but what kept me up at night had little to do with the question of betting and much to do with what Coppins calls “the casinofication of everything.” What he described sounds eerily familiar to the most un-casino-like setting of all—the church.
Coppins said part of the problem in American life is that the authority figures making decisions—from senators to parents—don’t really understand what gambling is now. Some of them think of it as lonely old women playing slot machines in casinos on the Las Vegas Strip or, more benignly, as a couple of coworkers betting $100 that the Timberwolves will beat the Nuggets. The latter example is one of the reasons professional sports owners believe online gambling is good for their business: People get even more invested in their teams’ wins and losses if they have, as the cliché goes, skin in the game.
The problem, Coppins notes, is that the algorithmic nature of online betting actually changes the game. He told me to imagine a sports bar full of people watching a game. They are sharing an experience as they cheer for their team or boo for the opponent. Even in loss, there’s community as the group collectively groans. That’s true even if the crowd is made up of fans of opposing teams. Their jeering over such rivalries is itself a kind of bonding.
But with the onset of online gambling, Coppins told me, the guy on the barstool is not really looking at those around him or even at the television overhead. He’s on his phone. And what he’s betting on isn’t typically about who wins and who loses or even about point spreads alone: His bets are on an almost-uncountable variety of small, random acts in the game. The sports bar might be full of people cheering for the same team, but they’re playing different games.
When Coppins describes the “casinofication” of everything, he points to the ways betting markets are now about, almost literally, everything. You can bet on whether a Venezuelan drug boat will be blown up between May 1 and May 10. You can bet on whether Tom Holland and Zendaya will split up in 2027. You can bet on whether famine will hit North Korea by winter. And on and on.
That doesn’t mean the gambler will care about those situations in and of themselves—people who bet against famine aren’t typically motivated to work on world hunger. It means the person will be invested in his or her own interests.
Casinofication breaks down community. If I’m playing my own secret, individual game, then I’m separated from the very thing the teams are meant to do—connect people in shared appreciation for the art of the game or in shared belonging to the same hometown. That’s why what seems to be a short-term win for a team’s owners is a long-term loss. It raises the apparent stakes while lowering the real ones. Corporations think betting will make young men care more about sports, but they’re actually severing them from the communities that would have made them care about sports for a lifetime.
The Secret Prayers of Gamblers
Coppins writes in his essay about how his growing obsession with his gambling app brought out something in him he never expected: personal hatred. When a player he had bet on fumbled the ball, Coppins felt a visceral rage and then noticed that he was critical, from that point on, of everything the player did—the way he talked at the postgame press conference, even the way he walked up to the end zone. Coppins hated this player he had never met—not for the way his playing had disappointed the group of fans but for the way he had personally cost Coppins. He could see in his own psyche how his affections were being algorithmically reordered without his consent.
In that way, the individual replaces the community, and the individual is eroded too. After all, as Coppins and I discussed in our conversation, 11- to 14-year-old boys are seeing floods of ads and, more importantly, are allowed to win when they do play. Their losing is not in the companies’ interest at first. They want a bettor to experience the dopamine rush of winning—and winning really big—until the dopamine rush is the thing he’s chasing. Not the sport, not the team, not even money. He thinks that he’s a winner—that his knowledge or skill or even luck is better than other people’s—without ever knowing that behind all of that are some faceless guys in suits who don’t care about him or the team or the game.
Very few people (I hope) are betting on what praise songs they will sing at church this Sunday or how many weeks the sermon series on Philippians will go or how many infants will cry during the baby dedication. But that doesn’t mean we are safe from the casinofication around us. In fact, we are—all of us—in danger of having already accommodated to it.
Every culture assumes some kind of split between the individual and the community. The Bible does not. Israel starts with one man, Abraham, and becomes a multitude. The multitude narrows to a remnant, and the remnant narrows to one law-keeping man and then broadens out to a crowd no one can number. The church, specifically, creates both true individualism and true communitarianism. We are collectively “the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Cor. 12:27, ESV throughout). We have a common mission but individual giftings to accomplish it (vv. 1–11). We have a common ethic as a community, but we respect the consciences of individual persons among us (Rom. 14:1–23).
To press the metaphor, we win together and lose together—and both can bond us closer to Christ (8:17) and to one another (12:15). In many ways, we have different games and teams going on in our lives, but what ultimately binds us together is that we are playing the same game, with the same stakes and scoreboard.
We have always been tempted to forget our common goal. The New Testament is filled with stories of the church being confused about whether the “game” it’s playing is celebrity identification (1 Cor. 1:11–13) or ethnic tribalization (Gal. 2:11–14) or financial prosperity (Acts 8:9–24) or political captivity (Rev. 13:1–18). In every age, the church must be shaken out of that confusion.
The guy looking at his smartphone in the sports bar and checking his betting app isn’t really watching the game. The game is just a means to achieve what he really cares about—his bank balance or his self-image as a winner or the little adrenal rush that comes with it. There are always forces at work that want to do the same thing to us—with a much more ultimate game.
The gospel and the church become carriers for what we already care about on our own individual or tribal terms. When the gospel becomes a tool—for culture war, institutional survival, partisan politics, and personal brand—its relevance feels sharp and immediate. The things I already care about are being addressed. But the slow formation of intuitions, instincts, and affections is being hollowed out.
If the New Orleans Saints are just a vehicle for a gambling addiction, a fan can find a team that can do that better. If football itself is the same kind of vehicle, the addict will ultimately find a sport that can serve him more reliably. Eventually, he is no longer a sports fan—he’s an app fan.
Once a new generation sees the church as being about marketing products or voter mobilization or ethnic tribalization or anything else, people will find both the “I” of individual identity and the “we” of group identity in something other than the gospel of Jesus Christ. Having money or supporting a ministry or being a Republican or Democrat or demonizing and idealizing people in the “correct” categories—that becomes the thing. That becomes the game.
This mindset can work especially well with fear and anger, which can give the illusion of both a personal jolt of life and a cohesive group of “us versus them.” Our minds shift. We keep score by different metrics than those Jesus gave us. We think we are claiming the individual and the communal when we’re really losing both.
And all the while, neither approach to these concepts is true. It’s in somebody’s interest to get me playing his or her game. The house always wins.
The danger is there as long as it’s invisible. When we realize we are on a different field, we can remember that, as Paul put it, we are playing according to a different set of rules (2 Tim. 2:5). We can see that the stands are full of a different cloud of onlookers than those we can see (Heb. 12:1). We can recover a real “we” that doesn’t bypass but instead makes the “I.” And we can do it with the slow, boring, unglamorous work of being formed by churches that we didn’t pick for their algorithmic fit and that aren’t using us to do something else.
We can look up from whatever devices are holding us in thrall and love the game again. Is that hard in times like these? Yes. Will it be difficult for the church to counter casino culture with something that really matters? Of course. Can we do it? You bet your life.
Russell Moore is editor at large and columnist at Christianity Today as well as host of the weekly podcast The Russell Moore Show from CT Media.
