Last week, an illegal gambling probe exposed the NBA’s Terry Rozier, a guard with the Miami Heat, and over 30 other individuals in professional basketball and beyond. Since sports betting became legal in 2018, sports leagues have developed close relationships with gambling companies. In these connections, problematic behavior can thrive.
The Bulletin sat down with editor at large Russell Moore and Isaac Rose-Berman, a fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men, to discuss smartphone betting, the most popular form of sports gambling today. They talk about why Christians are quiet and how the church can step up for vulnerable young men attracted to this vice. The entire interview can be heard in episode 195. Here are edited excerpts.
A complex matrix already exists in professional sports as it relates to player safety and profit margins. How does sports betting complicate the situation?
Isaac Rose-Berman: The NFL and other sports leagues make a lot of money off of sports betting, whether it’s via the advertisements that you see every time you run a game, the data that they’re able to license and sell to operators, or revenue sharing agreements with these companies.
Of course, when DraftKings and FanDuel are making money, people are losing money. People in sports are now asking whether making that money in the short term will have long-term consequences.
Think about kids growing up now. Are they NFL fans? Are they DraftKings fans? For the league, in the short run, that can be good. But if someone is not actually attached to a team and they’re just attached to betting on that team, that might not be so great in the long run. How sustainable is it for people to keep losing a lot of money for the long term? We’ve seen revenues from gambling go up so much, so quickly. Is this really sustainable? No one really knows the answer to that yet.
How have Christians traditionally viewed gambling?
Russell Moore: Many early Christians saw the gambling over the cloak of Jesus at the foot of the cross as an example of human depravity (Matt. 27:35–37).
Much later, in American Christian life, opposition to gambling often merged the liberal-fundamentalist divide about whether our problems are fundamentally personal or social. Conservative evangelicals were concerned about the personal vice that happens with gambling. Liberal Christians were concerned about the social effect of what happens to families and communities through addiction.
Add to that smartphones, and you have the same thing that we saw with the move of porn from interstate video places to the ubiquity of the internet. The algorithmic push of smartphones creates a dopamine rush that brings a whole new level of complexity that Christians haven’t faced before.
Rose-Berman: Once, it might have been man or woman versus vice. Now, it’s man or woman versus vice combined with billion-dollar companies with incredibly intelligent algorithms that are motivating you to place more bets and lose more money. Online and mobile sports betting is male dominated because younger men are more likely to be on their phones. Men want this rush, especially if they’re sports fans. The consequences are really concentrated among those people who have serious problems.
These companies target losers. If you are gambling daily on a site like DraftKings or FanDuel and you take a couple days off, you’ll get a push notification saying, “Hey, come back now. Your next bet is on us.” Even though gambling has been around for millennia, it’s this new iteration that’s really scary.
You can’t escape the advertisements for gambling. Even if you were to give up your smartphone, you wouldn’t be able to watch sports without being inundated with these ads. If you go to a game, you see DraftKing’s ads in the stadium. If you’re listening to the commentator on ESPN, they’re talking about the betting lines.
I used to go to baseball games with my father, and I was a big baseball fan. Today, if you’re a 10-year-old there with your dad, he’s probably placing bets on the game while you’re not looking. Young men are growing up in a society where this is normalized. They see celebrities telling them that it’s cool to bet, and there’s no pushback.
Does the US have legislation to limit these addictive and harmful apps?
Rose-Berman: There’s not much federal legislation at the moment. One bill, the SAFE Bet Act, doesn’t seem likely to pass in its current iteration. Online sports betting is a state-by-state issue, and different states have different regulations and different resources available. In some states where online sports betting is legal, there are only like four or five addiction counselors in the whole state. Their hotlines are overwhelmed.
Is there any way to gamble responsibly?
Moore: I don’t think so. Even if there’s a small percentage of people who are drawn into addictive behavior, those people are disproportionately poor.
The church ought to talk about this, but often people don’t want to feel legalistic or fundamentalist. You have this entire category of people’s lives where there’s no consideration of virtues that need to be cultivated. We are responsible to the vulnerable poor and to their families.
Rose-Berman: This is a battle that has been fought by Christians and Protestants historically in America, and it was lost. Battles against state lotteries, bingo, and casinos—these were battles that were lost. When that happened, Christians said, “This is not a winning issue. We’ll focus on other things—abortion or pornography—where we might have wider support.” I do think that is changing now. People are realizing the consequences here are disastrous.
How can men in the church support young men tempted by online sports betting?
Rose-Berman: This is a rigged game. That’s something a lot of people don’t appreciate. You’re not going to have young boys go tell their friends about this big slot win they had, because everybody recognizes that if you win big at a slot, it’s all about luck. Whereas in sports betting, it taps into the male ego, and everybody wants to feel really smart. When you place that long-shot parlay and you predict all of these things, you feel like a genius. And there’s nothing better in the world than that feeling.
A lot of times, people make the mistake of saying sports betting is just like all other forms of gambling—the house always wins—when that’s actually not the case. It is possible to make money on sports betting; but the caveat there is, if you know what you are doing, these companies will kick you out.
I have gone to schools and talked to kids, and that’s the message I give them. Look, if you are still able to bet, it’s because these companies have deemed you to be a sucker. You have to appeal to their ego and say, “You are not actually good at this.”
When you look at the surveys of young men, something like 70 or 80 percent of them say either that they are winning money or that they’re not losing money. What we really need to do is combat this delusion, because if you go on social media, you think anybody is posting about their big losses? No, they’re only going to post about their big wins.
We need people to understand that, actually, this is a rigged game, and you, as an 11-year-old boy with your hunch about who your favorite quarterback is, are no match for the million-dollar algorithms and analysts these companies are employing. Even if theoretically you were really good at this, they would show you the door. So play if you want, but don’t actually expect to win.
