It Was Evangelicals’ Noble Crusade. Why Did They Give it Up?

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In the late ’90s, the last time, perhaps, that state-sponsored gambling didn’t seem inevitable, the evangelical activist James Dobson warned^[2] that “gambling fever now threatens the work ethic and the very foundation of the family.” Good Christians, he wrote^[3], must act: “We must reject the fantasy that wagering is innocuous entertainment and deal earnestly with the destruction and pain that it causes to individuals, families and society.”

At the time, states were adopting lotteries—part of a wave that began in the 1980s—and groups such as Dobson’s Focus on the Family rallied their supporters against these initiatives, warning of greed, of the degradation of the family, of exploiting the poor, of idolatry—of vice. Through the ’90s and early 2000s they urged pastors to launch letter-writing and get-out-the-vote campaigns against lotteries; commissioned studies into gambling’s harms; bankrolled lobbyists; and testified against the initiatives at state legislatures. In states such as Missouri, Baptist-led groups defeated ballot initiatives by preaching^[4] the righteousness of their cause, connecting it to campaigns against same-sex marriage. Christian groups powered the fight against gambling, making it an issue of urgent spiritual concern for the nation.

We’re at another moment of reckoning with gambling. It’s been seven years since a Supreme Court ruling overturned a national ban on sports betting, and in that time, a new and massive industry has fully materialized, pounding state legislatures with blitz lobbying campaigns and transforming the landscape of sports in America. Sports betting is now legal in 39 states, and the country’s top pastime now doubles as a kind of dopamine-hit get-rich-quick scheme. Watch any football or basketball game, and you’ll see an advertisement for FanDuel or DraftKings, often alongside the face of an A-list celebrity. It’s inescapable, and fans have responded with enthusiasm: Polling indicates almost half^[5] of all young men have sports betting accounts. The American Gaming Association predicts^[6] that Americans will wager $30 billion in legal sportsbooks on the upcoming NFL season.

The popularity of this new form of gambling belies just how predatory it is. Because sports betting is done on phones, the major companies can take advantage of all the psychological tools that social media companies have developed to track your behavior, keep you on their apps, and incentivize spending, even after—or particularly after—you show signs of addiction. And once you spend enough money, the companies assign real people^[7] to message you to send encouraging messages or offer deals. As one gambling expert, Isaac Rose-Berman, a fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men, put it: “Alcohol stores don’t give you a coupon for a free drink if you’ve taken a week off drinking. But they’re a modern technology company. They know everything about you: when you log in, what’ll induce you to gamble … It used to be man versus vice. Now it’s man versus vice combined with a billion-dollar tech company. That’s not a fair fight.”

Now, seven years into the effort to legalize sports betting, the signs of its destruction are becoming hard to ignore. The sports themselves are breaking out with scandals^[8]. But the impact on fans is more dire: Studies have found that in states that have legalized sports betting, credit card debt^[9], bankruptcies^[10], and domestic violence^[11] have all increased. In schools, teachers are reporting^[12] classrooms full of teenage boys on their phones, placing surreptitious bets. (Most states have a minimum age of 18 or 21 to gamble, but the barriers are easy to get around.) Couples are getting divorced^[13] over sports betting addictions. States that legalized sports betting saw up to a 50 percent^[14] increase in searches related to addiction after legalization; some states reported^[15] up to nine times the number of normal calls to gambling hotlines. According to the American Psychiatric Association, problem gambling comes with the highest suicide risk^[16] of any form of addiction.

“We’ve seen students drop out of college because they’re using their tuition money,” said Jared Bahir Browsh, the director of critical sports studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “We’re at the point where people have been doing this for years and are figuring out what the financial impact is.”

As a result, there are signs of a brewing opposition. In recent years, as the dangers of sports betting have become clearer, states have begun implementing some guardrails^[17] on the industry. Public health advocates^[18] have filed lawsuits or spoken out against the industry. Certain groups with financial interests in halting the industry’s expansion—regional casinos and tribal governments, mostly—hope to sharpen the growing sense of unease^[19] around the scandals and the predatory practices into a real resistance^[20].

And yet, today, in this pivotal moment for gambling in the U.S., some observers have noticed something strange: the religious opposition is nowhere to be found.

There have been a smattering of state^[21]–level^[22] campaigns aimed at blocking sports betting, and some conservative Christian officials have cited their faith in opposing new efforts to expand online gambling. But there has been no major, national-level organizing or outcry against the sports betting industry. When the ban was nullified in 2018, some 42 percent of Protestant Christian pastors said they planned to advocate for laws restricting sports betting; only 8 percent polled in 2024^[23] had actually done so. In 2018, 33 percent of those pastors vowed to give sermons discouraging their congregations from participating in sports betting; in 2024, just 7 percent said they had.

And in the fight to protect the public from predatory gambling, the religious right is deeply needed—and sorely missed. In the past, evangelical attacks on the gambling industry were built on moral clarity: The movement had no financial self-interest in stopping gambling. Unlike regional casinos, they were not protecting their own right to exploit gamblers’ addictions. They were fighting against them. But the absence of a strong moral voice on sports gambling—the relative silence from evangelical leaders and influencers, compared to their impassioned denunciation of abortion and LGBTQ+ rights—is weakening any chances of a real opposition movement.

“This was one of the leading groups, and it seems to have fallen off,” said John Holden, a professor who focuses on sports betting and the sports industry at Indiana University’s business school. “It’s something I’ve mentioned to people: Hey, where are these groups? Everyone expected to see them, and we kind of haven’t.”

So where did those groups go? Why isn’t Focus on the Family whipping up major PR campaigns to squash ballot initiatives? Why aren’t conservative Christian influencers turning the public against the greed of the industry? Why aren’t pastors across the nation giving searing sermons testifying to the evils of gambling? Where are the conservative Christians—the gambling industry’s historic enemy—as guiding voices in the debate around sports betting?

The answers to these questions are complicated. But the real story of evangelical inaction can tell us less about religious failings and more about clashing cultural identities and the strange politics of aisle-crossing issues in a hyperpartisan world. The story is one that involves a very powerful lobby, a political recalculation from the sports leagues, a global pandemic, and a rupture within the evangelical movement. And above all, it’s a story of how, in modern American politics, the very things that make a cause noncontroversial, that can spur cross-aisle collaboration, can be its undoing.

To understand why evangelicals appear to have lost their taste for anti-gambling crusades, it’s necessary to first look at the ways the sports betting industry has enfeebled its entire opposition.

This issue cannot be understood properly without an acknowledgement of the bogglingly large sums of money poured into it. DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, and other major commercial interests have flooded statehouses with teams of lobbyists^[24] who often pitch gambling as a way to fund popular causes, such as scholarships or clean water. And those companies aren’t the only big players: The major sports leagues have seen the potential for their own gain—from increased fan engagement, from official paid partnerships, from media licensing, and from licensing the data sold to sportsbooks—and thrown their support behind the legalization bills. That pivot, a complete turnaround from the industry’s firm opposition to sports betting back in the ’90s, when athletes and league bigwigs testified that betting would corrupt sports, has eliminated one of the last major checks on the gambling industry’s lobbying power.

“There’s anywhere from 60 to 80 lobbyists here,” said Mike Griffin, a pastor and lobbyist with the Georgia Baptist Mission Board, speaking over the phone. “And a half dozen of us against them.”

That’s not their only advantage. The patchwork nature of sports betting legalization has made it harder for any kind of unified opposition to form. When certain kinds of laws become trendy—bathroom bills, for example, or red-flag laws—they’re often based on models written by outside advocacy groups and distributed to allied legislators in different states. “But we haven’t seen that in sports betting, which is rare on a hot-button topic,” Holden said. Instead, each state has taken its own approach, with different carve-outs, regulations, and funding models. The sports leagues and betting companies can afford to fund lobbyists at the individual level; advocacy groups are often stretched too thin to be able to track and fight it all.

Perhaps the most powerful advantage the sports betting industry had was its timing. When the federal ban ended with a Supreme Court ruling in 2018, many states were dealing with teacher strikes; gambling taxes promised an easy way to increase teacher salaries and improve school funding without raising unpopular taxes. But the real coup came during the pandemic, when states found themselves in a sudden financial emergency. One option appeared that offered a quick, painless solution: legalize sports betting, and the tax revenue will provide instant financial relief. A good number of states barely paused to question the long-term ramifications.

But all these strategic matters would fail if it weren’t for one irrefutable truth about sports betting: Most people see gambling as a problem for other people.

“There’s a widespread belief that gambling is a stupid-person tax,” Rose-Berman said. “That ‘The state might as well take it.’ There’s a broad lack of sympathy, currently and historically, for gamblers.”

The religious right, of course, has taken on plenty of difficult fights before. Christians fought viciously against abortion through the Roe years, even while legalization was widely popular^[25]. But there are elements of this controversy, in particular, that seem to sap the religious right of any sense of righteous, motivating anger.

For one, there’s a strong connection between evangelicals and sports. Evangelicals are most heavily populated around the South and the Midwest, where sports shape the flow of seasons; in the Deep South, where college football reigns supreme, it’s often only half-joked that scheduling a Saturday fall wedding the same weekend as a rivalry game is a nonstarter. Fantasy sports have been part of that tradition for decades; sports betting isn’t a huge step, culturally.

And more than with most forms of culture, sports are friendly to religious expression. Browsh, of CU–Boulder, noted that the two have long been associated with one another in the American mind, that athletes are religious at a higher rate than members of the general public, that sports are often seen as a clean way to keep young people busy and out of trouble, that “in every single interview, we’d see people thanking God, or going on a knee after a touchdown.” And this wholesome, all-American image has been transferred to sports betting, which has none of the grim imagery of a solitary slot machine in a dark casino. Instead we think of male bonding, of office pools and water-cooler chats, of the good-natured trash-talking that comes with fantasy leagues, of long-standing tradition.

“I just haven’t seen that level of concern, even from evangelical groups that would typically bring up issues of vices,” Browsh said. “I think it’s one of those issues where so many of them are doing it, it’s almost seen as a natural part of sports.”

The data bear that out. Among Christians polled^[26] in 2025, 42 percent had a positive view of sports gambling; only 22 percent had negative views.

But it’s not just sports gambling’s popularity among Christians that has made it harder for the anti-gambling faction to form. There are ruptures within the evangelical movement itself that have undercut the cause. The people who led the earlier fights against gambling—men such as Dobson, who died on Aug. 21—came from an old, conservative strand of evangelicalism with an interest in vice, issues that included pornography, obscenity, and alcohol. In the 1980s, the National Association of Evangelicals asserted^[27] that gambling was “socially, morally and economically destructive” and “violate[d] the biblical work ethic.” The Southern Baptist Convention passed resolutions^[28] through the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s that declared gambling sinful^[29] and urged the government to reject its normalization.

Meanwhile, many of the younger leaders—men such as Russell Moore, who once led the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and, notably, left the denomination^[30]—come at sports gambling from more of a social justice perspective, applying their understanding of Christian values to issues such as climate change and care for immigrants.

The problem for getting conservative evangelicals on board with fighting sports betting is the group between those two: the large population at the center of the mainstream religious right. According to Daniel Williams, the author of God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right, this middle group tends to care mostly about matters of sexual morality, with less interest in anything that is not explicitly condemned in the Bible. The older anti-vice crowd and the newer social justice crowd talk of greed, materialism, addictive behaviors, caring for the poor and vulnerable—“Those can be compelling arguments,” Williams said. “But I don’t know how many Southern Baptist, conservative Republicans would find all those arguments as convincing as an earlier generation of Southern Baptists would.”

For now, there’s still enough energy among the two factions to make some movement within evangelical circles. At its most recent convention in June 2025, the Southern Baptist Convention put out a resolution^[31] condemning the industry, warning of “significant spiritual, moral, ethical, and societal concerns,” and a violation of “the biblical principles of stewardship, work, and integrity, encouraging reckless management of resources entrusted to us by our sovereign Lord.” The SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission put out a guide to encourage pastors to address gambling from the pulpit.

But Williams argues that these signs have not translated into making sports betting a major political priority on the ground. That, Williams said, “would tend to suggest that creating a lasting political coalition on this issue is challenging.”

There’s one final reason that most agreed contributed to the evangelical ambivalence: the sense of futility in fighting it. John Litzler, the public policy director at the Christian Life Commission, the public policy and advocacy arm for Texas Southern Baptists, pointed out that there, the gambling industry has “Super Bowl money” while churches are largely nonprofits, “operating off volunteers and goodwill.” Greg Davis, the president of the Alabama Citizens Action Program, which lobbies for conservative Christian issues in the state, spoke of the relentlessness of the gambling lobby, of its “endless money” and year-after-year campaigns against bans. “Eventually they wear you down, you run out of money, take your eye off the ball, and boom, it’s passed, and it’s over,” he said. “You can’t undo it.”

“In a weird way, gambling brings people together,” Holden said.

This was a sentiment others had shared as well: Gambling creates unlikely political coalitions on both sides. Its supporters, Democrats and Republicans alike, point to quick boosts to state coffers. Megawealthy sports gambling companies are quick to back that argument, promising riches for the public good.

Sports betting’s critics are an eclectic group as well: There are addiction recovery groups, trying to remind the public that this is no different, physiologically, from drug or alcohol addiction. There are business groups concerned that gambling losses will decrease spending elsewhere. There are social justice advocates concerned for the heavy toll on the poor. And there are the conservative evangelicals, concerned about a “culture of greed^[32].” In other words, it’s a bizarre political bloc whose members don’t agree on much else.

And in a weird way, that’s why the coalition to stop it keeps stalling out.

For one, there’s plenty of internal mistrust. The conservative evangelical base, for example, has a knee-jerk suspicion toward anything the more social justice–oriented wing does. Moore was essentially forced out of the SBC after accusations of being “woke.” The Daily Wire’s Megan Basham put out an entire book^[33] investigating evangelical leaders like Moore—most of whom are conservative Christians—and accusing them of “selling out” to the left.

“If they’re the ones most sympathetic to criticisms of gambling—that’s probably not going to win them allies among people who are more hard-line culture warriors,” Williams said of the social justice evangelicals.

And there’s the issue of visibility. In a practical sense, having both Republican and Democrat sponsors of a sports betting regulation bill can help pull supporters. But the reality of the moment we’re in is that more purely partisan issues have something bipartisan issues don’t have: ready-made networks to amplify their messaging. When evangelical groups rail about abortion, there’s an entire conservative media apparatus ready to boost their message. Nonpartisan news media are also more likely to deem a topic newsworthy if there’s some conflict or controversy surrounding it. With no partisan sparring and no clear partisan valence, attention is harder to come by. That’s totally fine if you’re FanDuel: You have all the resources you need to move lawmakers without relying on public outcry. But for evangelicals concerned about what sports betting is doing to young men, a lack of public outcry limits their leverage.

In short, in our partisan world, exciting the public is a lot easier when you can demonize the other party.

In general, the qualities that kept the issue of sports betting bipartisan have blunted its political reach for a long time. Evangelicals failed to make vice issues unrelated to sex and reproduction core elements of GOP platforms, and in the ’90s, churches started losing vice wars more broadly: battles against obscenity, drinking, pornography—and gambling. As they lost, they began to shy away from gambling as a political issue. And over time, as the churches moved away from those political fights, the people in the pews came to care less about those issues, as well.

“For evangelicals who aren’t old enough to really remember the last major evangelical conversations about gambling in the 1990s—it’s just not on their radar,” Williams said.

In the end, the groups that remained invested in the fight were not the ones with ethical qualms, but those with financial interests in how gambling was rolled out. Most experts say that sports betting bills fail not because of concerns about addiction but because competing groups tend to poison each other’s campaigns. In California, for example, competing ballot initiatives pit tribal governments against the major commercial companies in a messy feud, turning the public against both. Legalization efforts ultimately tend to stall because of squabbling among different factions who want gambling rolled out in ways that will benefit their backers. Without partisan interest to kick up a fuss around certain values, it’s the interest groups, ultimately, that take up the fight.

There’s something a little tragic in how this ended up. To some gamblers, the religious opposition may seem patronizing and overbearing, a bunch of pearl-clutching from hypocrites who demand, for themselves, personal liberty to spend their money as they please. But for those who truly need protection—the young men going into debt because they can’t control their compulsions, the fathers missing mortgage payments because they’ve fallen victim to irrational optimism—Christians could help. The public often isn’t kind to gambling addicts, but that’s where faith can come in: helping people extend empathy to those who may not earn it, but do need it. But for now, the attention of the Christian right is elsewhere.

And in an era where the religious right finds itself aligned with a MAGA movement that relentlessly punches down—against immigrants, against transgender people, against Medicaid recipients—the fight against gambling is a chance to punch up, to side with people, often poor people, against corporations. Many of these pastors who oppose sports gambling hold strict, hellfire views on LGBTQ rights and reproductive freedom. But when it comes to this issue that they’ve carried for decades, these pastors and voices of the religious right speak with empathy.

In earlier generations, Christians opposed gambling on the grounds that it was sinful in itself—that a man was succumbing to weakness and vice when he gambled. Today, of those who still care about gambling, all but the most extreme of the old guard talk of gambling with the kind of language that justice-oriented progressives could embrace.

“The Bible talks about not exploiting the poor and caring for the most vulnerable among you,” Litzler, the lobbyist from Texas, said. “This practice is predatory; it preys off the people who are most at risk.”

“The church people that I represent, the pastors—they deal with a lot of fallout,” said Greg Davis, the Alabama Baptist. “They get the people showing up on their front door needing bills paid, they’re seeing marriages breaking up because the husbands blew everything, and now they need food and diapers for the baby because the money’s gone.”

These pastors, in a previous era, might have carried the moral voice against predatory gambling, against an industry that is pushing families toward addiction, discord, and deepening poverty. Today, they are instead largely leading small and siloed efforts in their states, trying to act as bulwarks against the relentless onslaught of the sports betting lobby.

As time passes, and stories of the predatory practices become public, some critics of the industry are spotting reasons for hope.

Litzler believes the companies’ greed will eventually cause something in their public relations machinery to break. “They’re trying to take more and more, and the amount of profits and earnings they get is never enough, so they’re always trying to do more,” he said. “And the public sentiment will swing back the other way.” But he added: “It may take a little time.”

But others thought something darker would need to happen, first. RaShan Frost, with the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, expected that things would “get worse” before people would come to understand how dire the situation is. Rose-Berman believes sentiments are slowly changing, but that the real reckoning would come after one or two “high-profile suicides”—a pattern he said other countries that legalized sports betting have seen. “That’s what actually moves the needle,” he said.

It’s possible that then, more evangelicals will rouse themselves to organize against it, as they did in the ’90s. In the meantime, some of them will continue to try to make noise where they can. “I’m trying to help people understand that there’s so much human pain and suffering,” said Mike Griffin, the Georgia Baptist. “We live in a sick, lost world until Jesus comes. But until that time, we have to love our neighbor.”

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