Joel and Michael expose how betting apps prey on families, noting $150B in 2024 wagers driven by predatory design. They contrast Augustine's warnings against profit-seeking gambling with the 2018 Supreme Court overturning PASPA, which legalized sports betting in 40 states for revenue rather than morality. Citing a Rutgers study showing half of gamblers earn under $50K and a Northwestern study linking legalization to increased debt, they argue civil magistrates must enforce bans on vice. Ultimately, the discussion asserts that state authority should protect citizens from exploitative industries, rejecting libertarian non-intervention in favor of moral regulation. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Gambling as Public Threat00:03:20
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Once upon a time, gambling was something done in back rooms in smoke filled basements.
Now, one in five Americans has a sports betting app right next to their Bible app.
In 2024 alone, Americans legally wagered nearly $150 billion on sports.
Nearly all of it, 95%, was done online.
No dice, no bookie, just tap, swipe, and lose.
For over a century, both American law and Christian conscience agreed that gambling was a vice, not merely a private sin, but a public threat.
It corrupted sports, from the nineteen nineteen Black Sox scandal to Pete Rose.
It bankrupted homes.
It bred addiction.
So in nineteen ninety two, Congress passed the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, barring states from legalizing sports betting.
The goal was to shield young people, uphold the integrity of sports, and slow the spread of a morally corrosive practice.
That restraint lasted twenty six years until the Supreme Court struck down PASPA.
In 2018.
Since then, we've witnessed a cultural transformation, not a thoughtful reprisal of risk and reward, but a full surrender to the gods of revenue, entertainment, and ease.
And that surrender has been lucrative.
Lobbyists promised lawmakers untold tax revenue.
Tech companies engineered betting apps that are frictionless, addictive, and nearly impossible to close.
Now, children can stream an NBA game and place a live bet on who misses the next free throw.
The app encourages it.
So does the league.
But is it just harmless fun?
A little added thrill to the game, perhaps?
Or is it something deeper?
A system designed not to entertain, but to exploit?
When gambling apps track your every wager, target your weaknesses, and make it easier to bet than to withdraw, is that still freedom?
Or is it a new form of bondage?
And what happens when Christians get pulled into the system?
For centuries the church understood games of chance as morally precarious, if not downright dangerous, not because randomness is sinful.
After all, the lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.
But rather because gambling treats chance as profit, and profit as providence.
It tempts us to see fortune as fate and risk as recreation.
Casting Lots for Decisions00:15:14
So, what are we really looking at here?
A neutral technology that needs guarding or a predatory industry that preys on disordered loves, promising fast money and delivering slow ruin?
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You can join our Patreon by going to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries, or you can donate by going to right response ministries.com forward slash donate.
So today we trace the long Christian view of gambling from biblical claromancy to digital entrapment and ask whether the modern church has fallen silent just as mammon found a new app store.
So let's dive in.
All right, here we are.
Here we are.
We're going to be talking about gambling today, as you've just seen from the cold open.
Michael, you have outlined this episode just right off the cuff from the outset.
I can't help but think there's so many things that I didn't think about when I was younger.
More and more things pop up.
And I just can't get away from the fact that the state really does have, I think, a God ordained vested interest in controlling a lot.
Right.
Like libertarianism has no guard.
Against what we're discussing today.
Yeah.
You know, get off my lawn.
You know, like maybe your lawn stays green for a while, but the rest of the nation goes to hell in a handbasket.
Like, I, you know, I've always just, you know, thought, you know, like let's just be conservative.
And, you know, so just a small state is a righteous state.
You know, small government, that's the way to go.
And don't get me wrong, there are plenty aspects of our government, you know, a managerial state, a welfare state, you know, plenty, plenty items.
Um, that that need to be much smaller, but um, but there are other items uh, where the government actually is called by God.
I mean, Romans 13 is fairly expansive to punish evil doing, and so then the question is, like, okay, so how many different forms are there of evil?
Um, is there economic evil, right?
Is there, you know, is gambling evil?
Um, a company preying on the poorest of the poor, um, is that evil?
Uh, there's a lot of evil beyond just you know, assault, you know, on a public street corner, and so um.
So, the government actually has a calling by God to be involved in these kinds of things.
And just a free market that allows for anything goes is not actually keeping with scripture.
That libertarian sentiment is still alive and well today, even though many, of course, they don't caucus with the Libertarian Party.
Just here in Texas, State Representative Brian Harrison, who's great on, for example, the sanctity of life, protecting the unborn, and other moral things, he voted against Texas's THC ban because he said, hey, the government, they don't have a role to regulate this.
Well, no, I do think that actually the government does have a role in regulating harmful and addictive THC products.
They're putting it in drinks, they're putting it in candies, kids are getting a hold of it.
Whereas the libertarians say, like, well, I mean, people should be free to consume, purchase, manufacture, sell.
And that sentiment still today, people voting, going, nope, government, hands off, we should be able to do what we want.
Right.
Best case scenario is the strongest libertarian argument can be made in the most virtuous society.
And even then, some of these things, whether it's, I mean, they didn't have online.
Things like we do now, but prostitution and gambling and things like that have been strictly regulated throughout American history from the very beginning when arguably we were at the most virtuous and the most self ruled and self governed.
So, yeah, Joel, you have a good point there.
Well, we are going to be talking about gambling and specifically about the rise of online gambling and specifically online gambling encompasses the apps and the sports betting that happens.
And so, this is something that I was thinking about.
Well, what's a topic that would be helpful?
And someone actually mentioned it in the chat, I don't know, a week or two ago.
And I thought we kind of cater to the manosphere a little bit.
And statistically, the manosphere is the group of people that is getting into this the fastest and the most.
And so I thought, well, it's a good thing to talk about.
And we're not, at least I'm not going to come out and say gambling is inherently sinful, right?
There are forms of gambling.
This has actually been something that has been talked about.
I was shocked at how much the church has talked about this from the very beginning, like all the way back.
And as I'll show with some of the quotes, a lot of the early fathers and even the scholastics, even Calvin, they said we can't find biblical justification to call the act of gambling sin.
But we can go so far as to say it's so unwise and so dangerous that it should be banned.
And so it's a situation where the church has taken a position largely that even though it's not objectively sinful, The dangers surrounding it were such that the state has a vested interest in stepping in and getting involved.
So, a couple of just opening facts to kind of justify why we're talking about this.
Sports betting, as we see it now, which I'll get into more later, was not legal in the United States until 2018.
Okay, so before 2018, you had to be in Las Vegas or what's the other one on the East Coast?
New Jersey City.
Atlantic City, yeah.
To do some of these sports bettings.
But by and large, you had to be there in person to do legal sports betting.
In 2018, the Supreme Court overturned a previous ruling and made it, the Supreme Court didn't make it legal.
They removed the federal statute that made it illegal, that regulated it.
So that's just 2018.
That's not that long ago.
In 2022, $7 billion were gambled in sports betting.
It was a dark year.
Last year, last year.
I could see what madness drove them to that.
No, no, no, no.
$7 billion is nothing.
Oh, okay.
Last year was $150 billion.
Oh, wow.
So we went from 2018 to zero to 2022, $7 billion to last year, $150 billion just on sports betting alone, online sports betting.
So this is a steep rise, a really, really steep rise.
We talk sometimes about the value of industries.
This one is one that is on the rise.
Um, up to 23, um, sorry, 95 percent of that's happening with online betting platforms or apps, right?
So you can go on your computer or right on your phone, you don't have to call someone, you don't have to be in a casino, you just click of a button on your phone.
That's 95 percent of that 150 billion.
And right now, 40 states allow sports betting, um, 34 allow it online or through apps.
So this number, the 150 billion, does not even include large states like California and Texas, both of them still.
Do not allow online sports betting at all.
And so the two most populous states in the country are not even part of this figure, and they hit 150 billion last year.
So in Texas, you can't do it?
Nope.
Cannot.
Do you have stuff on advertising later on?
A little bit.
Yeah.
I just have to say, like, this is incredible how much this has been pushed.
This was not, I mean, some of it is organic because people want to gamble for money.
But I mean, my goodness, the last few years, I'm sure we have all sat through the ads on television, we've seen them on our phone, they've been presented to us on social media, literally in billboards.
Bet, bet, bet.
That's been a huge part of the rise.
Yeah.
And not only that, but it's being built into like live streaming services.
So if you pay to watch the NBA or something like that, scrolling along the bottom now will be things like bet on if he makes the next free throw or, you know, and just boom, click of a button, you're betting a couple bucks or however many bucks you want.
And so it's all being integrated.
And that's one of the criticisms is that it's so seamless and the safety provisions are so hidden.
You have to click this button and this button, this button, this button, just to set a minimum or a maximum bet for yourself.
But you can almost immediately bet a ton of money very easily.
So we'll get into that in a minute.
What I wanted to start with just briefly is actually a little bit of the history of what Christian thought has been on this topic.
So, games of chance and casting lots have been around almost from the beginning of history.
We have evidence of it.
But throughout Christian history, there has been an attempt over and over again, and I know this because the theologians who write about it argue against it time after time after time.
There's been an attempt to say, well, the Lord himself encouraged the casting of lots, the Urim and the Thurim.
For making decisions, and this has been something that you talk about like some theology gets settled and some never really does.
This argument research it's in the early fathers, Augustine deals with it, um, and then in the scholastics, it's dealt with, Calvin dealt with it.
That argument comes up over and over again.
So, it is true that the Lord uh called people to use lots, and um, the guiding principle seems to be when there is a decision.
Or a resource that needs to be parceled out, and there's no real perceptible better way to do something.
It just really is six dozen of one, half a dozen of the other to determine an equitable distribution.
And so, mom brings home you know, popsicles, and the kids all want to take a turn.
Who gets the strawberry one that's the favorite?
You draw straws, right?
And then, you know, the kid with the longest straw gets to pick first that sort of distribution of resources.
A decision that really has no other guiding principle.
It could be this decision or this decision.
We're going to appeal to the Lord's providence.
It was really what the Urim and the Thurim were.
Or casting lots, for instance, drawing of lots to choose Judas's replacement.
That was an appeal to God's providence, not a casting yourself on the winds of chance, as it were.
Yeah, and it wasn't like we're going to cast lots for anybody to, you know, like Matthias.
Yes, that's true.
They got all the way down to two guys on merit.
So they first looked at who's been here since the beginning of Jesus' ministry, you know, who's.
Who was a witness of his resurrection, right?
Jesus only appeared to a select few.
It was large, you know, over 500 witnesses, but still that narrows it down, you know, quite a bit.
And so, like, here are all the criteria that have to be met in terms of wisdom, in terms of character, in terms of providence that this person has been a witness and been with us, you know, for this period of time and witnessed these events.
And when they got done with all the merit based criteria, they had whittled it down to two.
So, like, you can't look at that decision.
Nobody should look at the decision and say the apostles made it merely on the basis of chance.
No merit got them down from a virtually limitless sea of people to two.
And what they're saying is that, like, we narrowed it down as far as we can go and we've presented every single piece of criteria we can possibly present.
And these two have equally surpassed each of these criteria to where we have a tie.
We actually have a tie.
So in this case, it's like a football game.
One's on a seven, one's on an eight.
Right, yeah.
It's a football game, flipping a coin before the game starts to see who's going to kick off.
Correct.
No leadership structure either.
So this is not a wife going to her husband, man, I don't know, we're arguing about this.
He's like, we're really not.
She's like, okay, fine, I'll flip a coin over it.
It's the husband's say.
Master, slave, it's the master's say.
But in that context, there was not even a first among equals really with the apostles.
They were apostles.
It's the early church.
No structures.
They say, okay, we're literally in this case, every other recourse is gone.
We'll cast the lots.
Yep.
Yep.
Nate, I'm going to skip the first quote.
Let's go to quote number two, the one that starts with Clement of Alexandria.
So, I'm going to read some quotes from, I thought, a really helpful article.
I'm going to say the title of it in case the listener wants to go look at this article later.
It was very long and well written.
The article is called What Does It Profit Gambling in the Christian Tradition by Jordan Baller?
And it's found on the Acton Institute.
So, this is one of the quotes from his article.
He says, Clement of Alexandria articulated a balanced and nuanced perspective on wealth and its power administration.
Riches, he says, which benefit also our neighbors, are not to be thrown away.
For they are possessions, inasmuch as they are possessed, and goods, inasmuch as they are useful, and provided by God for the use of men.
And they lie to our hand, and are put under our power, as material and instruments, which are for good use to those who know the instrument.
So also a poor and destitute man may be found intoxicated with lusts, and a man rich in worldly goods, temperate, poor in indulgences, trustworthy, intelligent, pure, chastened.
His point was.
Whatever resources God has given you, whether you're rich or you're poor, God expects faithful use of them.
And in there, he talks about skillful use of them, but also a use of them that's going to have an eye to benefiting your neighbor.
And Clement was making the case there that games of chance have no benefit to your neighbor, they don't provide any sort of meaningful employment for your neighbor or any sort of reliable income.
And you basically, he was saying, you.
You're really running the risk of squandering away the money that God has given you for your benefit, for your use, and also for looking out for your neighbor.
Quote number three this is about Thomas Aquinas.
And so he says in the article Thomas Aquinas makes distinctions between participants in games of chance, especially whether someone has been taken advantage of in the relationship.
He treats gambling profits in the context of whether such money can illicitly be given as alms.
Quote, this is what Aquinas now says, the winnings themselves of gamblers are prohibited by law.
If one has played with someone who has the power to dispose of what is his, if he is drawn into the game and loses, he can seek restitution, writes Aquinas, because he has been taken advantage of by someone like a professional swindler.
Church Stance on Chance Games00:09:19
If the one drawn into the game by the swindler wins, however, quote, he is not bound to return the winnings, for the man who has lost is not worthy to receive, nor can he illicitly keep.
Unless positive laws were abrogated anywhere by the opposite custom, what he's saying here is if you're swindled or taken advantage of into a game of chance that you either didn't realize or you didn't realize it was rigged against you from the beginning, if you lose, he's saying, lawfully by natural law, you would have the right to seek retribution.
You were basically stolen from.
But I do find it funny, he says, but if you happen to beat the swindler at his game, too bad.
The swindler knew he was getting into it.
So I thought that was an interesting perspective.
He's based on usury, too.
Yeah, he didn't play.
Yeah, absolutely.
Quick quote from Luther.
This is number four.
Now, this is interesting because the question of usury and gambling, some people tried to say it was the same thing and some did not.
I just, for the record, Luther's position was money won by gambling is not usury either, yet it is not without self seeking, self love, and sin.
So he was saying money gained by usury is not gained by being productive.
Money earned by gambling is also not really.
Earned by being productive, lawfully productive.
But he's saying they're not the same thing.
But even so, the money that you gain from gambling, he says, is not without self seeking, self love, and sin, which I thought was interesting.
It was totally banned in Geneva.
Calvin, he actually was a representative of the Genevan government before he was a pastor.
And while he was there, he helped institute a complete ban on games of chance throughout the city of Geneva.
We do need to take that with a grain of salt.
Because he also banned going to the play and dancing, or going to the theater and dancing and things like that.
So it was all part of, I guess, what in Calvin's language, a body, B A W D I D Y, a body lifestyle or lascivious lifestyle.
So a couple interesting, a couple more quotes here just to kind of set the theological history.
So this is quote five, Nate.
He's talking here about Calvin.
This is again from the same article.
He says, Those men who think it to be wickedness to cast lots at all.
So here, Calvin goes so far as to say we're banning it, but it's not overtly sinful to cast lots.
Those men who think it to be wickedness to cast lots at all offend partly through ignorance and partly they understand not the force of this word, writes Calvin.
There is nothing which men do not corrupt with their boldness and vanity, whereby it is come to pass that they have brought lots into great abuse and superstition.
For that divination or conjecture is made by lots is altogether devilish.
But when magistrates divide provinces, this is resources among them, and brethren incur their inheritance, it is a lawful thing.
And so Calvin actually found it necessary to defend the just use of lots as a visible display of God's providence against the abuses of gambling for profit and for divination.
That's similar to how he is on usury, where he says, Look, if it's your income, you're providing nothing of value.
Right.
But I do recognize practically someone needs some money, they go to their neighbor, and this says, Hey, I'm giving you $5,000.
Give me $5,100 back for it.
Recognizing that it's not a strict black and white, but practically speaking, are you providing value?
What is this used for?
And where the Bible isn't clear, he's neglecting to give a hard and fast rule.
Yep.
Yep.
Absolutely.
Okay.
Two more quotes.
Quote six.
This is from a Puritan named Thomas Gadiger.
And so, again, quoting from the article, the writer of the article says, The most substantial and influential work concerning lots, lotteries, and chants more generally was penned by the Puritan divine.
Thomas Gadigar.
In his 1619 treatise of the nature and use of lots, he writes that the legitimate use of lots understood and applied some system, pardon me, applied this Christian teaching, had to do with matters of uncertainty or doubt.
They could be licitly used to make a determination where there was some epistemic shortfall on the part of humanity.
In other words, we don't have the right enough information to make a decision.
Thus, asserts Gadigar, a lot is a quote event.
Purposely applied to the deciding of some doubt.
Lotteries are from the human side mechanisms of pure chance, and their purpose is to provide some determination in a matter of doubt or uncertainty.
Where there is no other rational means of determining ownership, for example, or for distributing some good, then appropriately constructed lotteries can be used as a means of determining just distribution.
And then the last quote that I want to read, just because I think it's interesting, is quote eight.
Let's jump on to quote eight, Nate.
I'm sorry, this is not quote eight.
Is that it on the screen, Michael?
Well, I'll read that one.
Gambling may, in some instances, be morally permissible, but it's always dangerous.
Grappling responsibly with these kinds of dilemmas and temptations is a constant feature of life in this faulting world.
As Augustine lamented, when I am in trouble, I long for good fortune, but when I have good fortune, I fear to lose it.
Is there any middle state between prosperity and adversity?
Some state in which human life is not a trial?
The one that I was looking for that I'm not going to read, I'm just going to mention that part of the Catholic Church's catechism for a long time has been a repudiation of prosperity.
All forms of games of chance.
So, all right.
So, I think what we'll do that's even apart from making wagers, like just playing cards.
Yes.
Okay.
Yep.
Yep.
Which is why, just to tie this up, there's this idea of I don't know any Catholic that follows that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's this idea of what is it called?
Stocks of vice.
So, these are investing in companies whose purpose is inherently a vice.
So, that's why, like owning a lottery store or owning a casino or a brothel or that sort of thing, like the Catholic Church put it in the category of a vice.
And so, it would be wrong for a Catholic in good standing, technically, to own or invest in a company that is promoting games of chance.
I see.
In the same way that it would be wrong for someone who's playing it, but it's purchasing that game.
Both okay, profiting from, yeah.
I knew I didn't know that that was a Catholic teaching.
I knew that, um, historically there were uh Baptists that held to that, like my own grandfather and grandmother.
There was Skippo, yes, there was Uno, yep, and there were Domino's, yep, but there were no playing cards.
I found it here, it's quote seven eight.
If you want to put it up, just to clarify here and not speak out of turn, um, it says, similarly, the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church teaches that, quote, games of chance, card games, etc., or wagers.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Are not in themselves contrary to justice, they become morally unacceptable when they deprive someone of what is necessary to provide for his needs and those of others.
Compassion for gambling risks becomes an enslavement.
I'm glad I looked it up.
Yeah, me too.
That makes more sense.
Yeah, that makes more sense.
Otherwise, I mean, the alternative is if it was just outright, you know, then I was thinking every single Catholic is not abiding by Catholic teaching.
But then I thought, but I already think that about Catholics.
I mean, that, you know, so I was like, That can't be because that would mean every single Catholic doesn't actually know Catholic doctrine and follow it.
And I thought, wait a second, that is every single Catholic.
Right, a minute.
Which, and I say that with the utmost due respect.
That's my favorite thing about it.
I have lots of Catholic friends, and that's my favorite thing about them is that every Catholic friend I have is a bad Catholic, which makes them, in many cases, a good friend and sometimes a good Christian.
Yep.
So good.
All right, let's hit our first commercial break, and then we're going to talk briefly about how it became legalized in the US, and then we'll talk about kind of some of the trends and Dangers and just kind of talk through the cultural moment now, not what the church fathers have said before, but how we ought to think about this in our time now.
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Government Role in Betting00:15:50
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All right, we're back.
All right, we are back.
So, as I mentioned earlier on, for a long time in the U.S., sports gambling in particular was illegal.
In fact, There are major sports scandals like the members of the Chicago White Sox who gambled through a game on purpose because they had gambled on it.
It was a World Series game, I believe, and they threw it on purpose so they could profit.
Pete Rose, one of the greatest baseball players of all time, has been permanently banned from the Hall of Fame because he was found to have been gambling on games.
So for a long time, this was seen very seriously in the sports world.
Now you have professional athletes partnering with betting companies to do their commercials and things like that.
So we've had an entire 180 degree perspective change on this topic.
How would that not manipulate, you know, or at least present the temptation to manipulate sports?
Like, if I think they themselves are banned from betting on it, they can't bet on it.
They can still promote it so they can get a better bet.
Yeah, so I get that.
I get the distinction there.
Nate is correcting me.
I hadn't seen that, Nate.
That's new.
June 4th?
Two days ago, an article in The Athletic MLB's reinstatement of Pete Rose was partially influenced by Donald Trump, the commissioner says.
Sports betting is back on the menu, boys.
There we go.
Back on the menu.
But yeah, promotion is different.
It is.
Not that it's good, but it is different.
But my thought is that, like, okay, so you personally can't open an account, you know, LeBron James, you know, and then bet.
But I mean, how easy would it be for them just vicariously through somebody else to place bet?
His friend, his brother, his.
And then he has the power to like miss the next free throw or whatever.
Or like, you know, like you're winning by three points, you know, and it's like, I can.
I can make this last shot, you know, and win by five, but I bet on winning by three.
Right.
And so I'm going to miss it.
Like, I just feel like that just the mere presence of sports gambling would, for me, would call into question how authentic, you know, sports actually are.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And yeah, that is a whole conspiracy that you can jump down that rabbit trail about how all the sports games are all controlled.
And I still have a hard time because you cannot.
You can't control everything in a sports game, right?
You can't control the way the ball is going to bounce or all those things.
Anyway, before 2018, in 1992, the US government, the federal government, passed something called PASPA.
PASPA was the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act.
And what they did was they were trying to accomplish a couple things.
They were trying to curb the spread of state sponsored sports gambling.
There was public concern about the growing trend towards legalizing sports gambling, fueled in part by high profile scandals like the Pete Rose case that we just mentioned now.
The other reason why they passed this regulation was to maintain the integrity of professional sports.
The sports, the leagues themselves, were opposed to states allowing betting.
They said that if the states allowed betting, it could lead to bribery and game fixing, like you just said, Joel, and they cited historical scandals.
And they were concerned they wanted to protect young people from the harms of sports gambling.
So there were concerns that it would have a negative impact on young people.
So, what this did, and the reason it got overturned, is Congress passed a law that forced states to regulate a federal law of some sort.
The language is a little bit tricky.
And so, basically, it made the states.
The agents of enforcement of federal protocols and federal requirements.
So when the NCAA sued in 2018 and won, it was not even close.
It was a 72 decision by the Supreme Court, not on the merits of sports betting, but on the constitutional merits that the federal government cannot require states to uphold its federal statutes.
And so the reason that it was overturned in 2018 really had very little to do with whether gambling was a good idea or not.
It was this constitutional question that states cannot be forced to basically do the federal government's dirty work for the federal government.
So the law that was passed in 1992.
I believe they did not have enough support to just have legislated a federal ban on sports betting.
What they could pass was a requirement that states had to do some of these things on behalf of the federal government.
So, if we wanted to have a national ban on it, the US Congress would have to just actually pass a national ban on it.
What it did was it went back to the states, kind of like abortion.
And within a few years, now 40 of the states have allowed sports betting, and only about 10.
Have continued to ban it the way it had been before 1992.
Well, hey, Congress works for us and they have our best interests at heart.
So I'm confident there's legislation coming down the pipe.
Absolutely.
Matter of days at this point.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And this is one that is a little bit tricky constitutionally because it's not clear that the federal government would have, within the Bill of Rights, the reach to pass something that theoretically is left up to the states to determine individually.
So.
It's part of the federal system that we live in.
Yeah.
All right.
So let's talk a little bit about the situation now that we have.
Okay.
I'm going to read a couple of things and point out a couple of facts and figures.
So this is a quote from thehill.com.
It says We have a movement toward expanding what was once considered a sin, what was once considered a vice, and embedding it at every level of American culture down to kindergarten, said Timothy Fong, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Jane and Terry.
Uh, Samuel Institute for Neurosirons, and so he is pointing out now that sports betting used to be even when it was legalized only on the major sports or the Super Bowl or a horse race or something like that.
Now, I mean, you look at Poly Market, this is not sports betting, I know, but it's something different.
But you can bet literally on anything, yeah.
Um, and when it comes to sports betting, not only are people betting on major games, but they're betting on, you know, will LeBron um dunk six times in this game.
And it's even outside of the NBA.
It's going to very minor sports that are not really watched, such as e sports.
And you can place a bet on almost any aspect of that sporting event at almost any level of sporting events.
And you can bet on politics.
You can bet on politics now.
Yeah.
You can bet on really just about anything.
You can bet on the Fed and whether or not they're going to cut interest rates this month.
All of that.
Yeah.
So this guy's point is opening up sports betting.
Is actually introducing betting to every element of society where if you want, you can literally bet on what the gas prices are going to be or who's going to be the next governor or all of these things.
And so society now becomes just kind of a canvas for flips of the coin and am I going to get lucky and accurately predict whether an event happens or not?
Right.
I bet on Donald Trump to win the popular vote.
Yep.
That was correct.
Yep.
The popular.
The popular.
I just believe.
What were the odds on that?
I think it was about, I think it was like a 20, no, it'd be lower than that.
There's like raw popular vote and then the margins like zero to 1%, one to two.
So I just voted raw.
Raw, I want to say it was like a 20% chance.
Yeah.
Yep.
Yep.
So it was a good bet.
But to your point, like literally we can bet on anything now.
Yeah.
On anything.
And the concern is that it's now, it's what I hear you say, Michael, is just such a matter of accessibility at this point.
Correct.
That at this point, it's, yeah, it's just, it's, you know, before, you know, you would have to fly to Las Vegas, you know, or even in older societies, you would have to go and find, you know, the den of thieves.
You know, that's the place where the gambling was taking place.
Same as pornography.
Right.
So it's all forms of lewdness.
So pornography, it's like, well, you know, people always present, you know, the anecdotes, you know, and say, like, well, there were brothels, you know, right?
It's like, yeah, but on the terrible, dangerous side of town, and your whole way there, you would be, you know, being booed and shamed publicly.
People are seeing you.
People are seeing you.
You have a bad reputation.
Literally, like, most of the upstanding families in the town are not.
Even going to allow their children to play with your children because you're a public disgrace.
It takes your whole evening.
Right, yeah, because you like it's this is your, you know, it's a physical thing.
Like, I mean, you even think like in the 80s, you know, like people would have to go to like a pornography film store, you know, the porno shop, you know, porn magazines or stuff like that.
But now, what it's allowed for is this universal accessibility.
But not just a universal accessibility where everyone can do it, but also a universal privacy.
So, everyone can do it, and there are no social consequences.
And not just because society is circling the drain, and that people may not frown on things that they would have 50 years ago, but also because of being anonymous, that nobody even knows that it's taking place.
So, I don't know how to view that other than saying that that is a promotion of these vices.
It's a promotion of pornography, it's a promotion of gambling.
And if these things are promoted, It's going to affect everyone, but even that, it's, you know, that's another thing that I think makes it so pernicious and sad is that it's not going to, it's going to affect everyone negatively, but not equally.
And gambling, I mean, is proven time and time again, like whether it's a lottery or these kinds of things, it's always, it preys on the most desperate, you know, it preys on those who are the most impoverished because they viewed as their chance to get out of their dire situation.
And so, yeah, so I just don't see how that could possibly be a positive thing.
And when I think again, like Romans 13, it's like, well, you know, libertarianism, get off my lawn.
The government, this is outside of the state's jurisdiction.
This falls underneath the jurisdiction of the family.
Fathers should be teaching their sons not to look at pornography, you know, and fathers should be teaching them good financial habits, you know, and to stay away from gambling.
It's like, yeah, but also it really is evil.
And the government.
Is actually called by God to bear the sword to punish the evil doer.
And so I think it does fall under the state.
And for fathers, it's like, yes, we want to train our children in the way that they should go.
But you're talking about every single one of your sons hitting puberty.
And yes, keep them off the internet, don't give them a smartphone at the age of 13.
Those things are insane.
But eventually, he's going to be an adult.
And he's going to, it's not just that there's a strip club in town.
There's a stripper in his pocket.
That's right.
And limitless choices of which stripper he wants it to be, you know?
And with that kind of temptation, with complete impunity and privacy, and also complete accessibility.
Sometimes I look at these things, I guess what I'm building up to is I really do think that our society as a whole is objectively less moral than previous generations.
But I also think previous generations.
That's right.
Would not have stood a chance, yes.
Like, I and like Benjamin Franklin, that dude, I don't even think he would have been able to do anything in politics or discover electricity.
That dude would be looking at his iPhone, yeah, pornography 24 hours a day.
He'd like his eyes would be glazed over, like, you know what I mean?
Like, it's like, thank god he had to go, you know, all the way to France, you know, or something for his escapades.
You know, like Ben Franklin would be a just a just porn slop addict, a horn dog, yeah.
So, like.
So, yes, I do think that overall society is worse, but it's kind of like chicken or the egg.
You know, like, yes, there is an objective abandonment of Christ, and that's ultimate and fundamental.
But in addition to that, there's like, if you don't think that there's more temptation today, right?
I don't even know how you would argue in the other direction.
I mean, the temptation is absolutely off the charts.
And so, even if we were as moral as many of our fathers, We would still be in a worse situation.
We'd be failing with far more regularity.
Yeah.
That's, I was going to say why when we talk about politics, because there's huge implications on the line.
You're literally talking about the morality of a people.
Again, not literally, I can literally make them moral by imposing laws from above.
But no, practically speaking, you can promote morality and it has a huge downstream effect.
Like, we're not just talking about, like, do we want the tax rate at 12% for corporate or 11% or do we, you know, should notaries be open on Saturday or closed?
We are talking about real moral things that have huge implications.
Like it all actually matters.
Civil Magistrate's Moral Duty00:04:55
And if you're a Christian, you just, well, you know, government's going to do what it's going to do.
We should teach our sons to resist.
Like that, that's borderline wicked to not say, well, no, no, I want the best for my people, the best for my nation, and I'll take the means to actually get that right.
Right.
And it's like if you're not doing that, it is both.
What are you doing both?
Like, just to be clear for the listener, Wes is not saying, therefore, fathers are off the hook.
Right.
No.
Like, of course not.
Like, we, fathers have to do everything they can, and the individual is certainly culpable.
They have to resist that temptation.
And the call of Christ remains the same regardless of how much temptation is present.
But as a Christian man and husband and father, I want to protect my wife and kids and train them.
And I also want to call upon the civil magistrate.
Thomas Watson said that the civil magistrate, the Christian prince, that he is a nursing father.
And what kind of nursing father goes into the nursery and puts vipers or scorpions in the crib with his baby?
Like, it's like, well, I didn't, I didn't, you know, make it.
I didn't bite him and I didn't make it, but I just made it available.
I just put the scorpion in the crib.
And, you know, my baby is the one who chose to roll over and, right, like, and get, you know, stung.
Like, we would say, I mean, like, that wouldn't, that would never hold up.
We'd say you'd be thrown in jail.
Right.
And, and if you think of the Christian prince, the civil magistrate, as a father figure, he is a civil father.
That's what he is, civil father.
That's what Thomas Watson is arguing when he talks about the Ten Commandments, the fifth commandment honor thy father.
There are familial fathers, there are ecclesiastical fathers, spiritual fathers, ancient fathers, remembering the founding fathers, and then beyond them, the Puritans and the Reformers and Augustine and Irenaeus.
But there's also civil fathers, and they're worthy of our respect in one regard for sure, and potentially two.
The one regard, either way, whether they're terrible or whether they're great, they're worthy of our respect by virtue of their office and then by virtue of their position, but then by virtue of their person, if they happen to be.
A noble civil father, someone like George Washington, is worthy of double respect.
And so, my point is if that is their role to be a father and to protect and to punish the evildoer, the one who wants to subvert and supplant and exploit, then absolutely.
I don't know how you can make any argument that the state, not only is it their prerogative, but that they are morally obligated under God to ban.
Uh, pornography to ban gambling.
We were in the room with Carl Truman, this was about three or four years ago, and he's like, I know he like literally gave these terrible stories of abuse or whatever.
And he's like, I know there are free speech considerations.
So when it came to banning pornography, he kind of hemmed and hawed, like, Well, there's free speech on one side, but it's also morally bad.
And I don't know, guys, you should really wrestle through this.
All right, wrestle through, ban it.
That's the extent of it.
No, I remember that.
An OPC Presbyterian minister, yeah, and professor at Grove City College, and the guy who promoted Amy Bird, like, that's Jim.
To your point, Joel, one of the kind of perverse incentives going on with the situation that we have now is the government is supposed to be protecting its people.
But now, one of the major pushes to get state legislatures to legalize sports betting within their state is you're going to get so much money in tax revenue.
And so now, not only was that what hooked a lot of legislators into it, but there is now an incentive for the state to actually promote this sort of thing, or at least allow it to be promoted, so that they get more and more.
Tax revenue because they tax this at a pretty high rate.
Right.
Yeah.
They'll hail the GDP.
That's right.
The last thing I was going to say about this is a couple things just to confirm what we've been saying.
There was a Rutgers study recently that found that half of sports gamblers earn less than $50,000 a year.
So half of the ones placing these bets are indeed what we consider like lower middle class or lower class, the ones who really cannot afford to be doing this sort of thing.
Checks out.
Yeah.
And that desperation and the accessibility causes them to make.
Foolish decisions.
Let's go ahead and go to our last commercial break and we'll come back with some concluding thoughts.
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All right, we are back.
We are back.
Wes is going to take it from the top here with an anecdote, and then I'm going to talk a little bit about ease of use, ease of access, and then we'll have some concluding thoughts and wrap things up here.
Shady Micro-Betting Incentives00:11:37
Yeah, it came to mind when Joel mentioned the most desperate.
I remember it, it's burned into my memory here in Austin.
This is about six months ago or so.
I was in a gas station, and I literally walked as I'm leaving.
I walked by a very heavy set gentleman, and he's got a scratch card.
This is, you know, he's not doing CrossFit, let's put it this way.
Very heavy set guy.
He's leaning on the counter and he's got a scratch card.
Couldn't even make it to his car at home, right there on the counter, scratching off.
So I walk by him and I walk out to my left and I see another heavy set.
This is a black woman in her car.
Literally, she has a ticket on the steering wheel, just scratching away.
I was like, what have we become?
These poor people that are obviously not doing well and they're here at the gas station.
This is with five, 10 bucks that they have to spare, just getting these tickets.
And you're on the counter, you're in your car, just scratching away, hoping for.
I mean, the amount you win from is probably like 20, 25 bucks, which what do they do?
But go back and just spend that again on lottery terms.
Just turn right around.
That's why they do it there.
Yeah.
Because if they win some money, they're going to go back and buy some more immediately.
This is terrible.
What have we done to these poor people?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
So that's interesting because one of the things that they're finding is there are casino gambling still has a little bit of a negative stigma to it.
And so there are online casino apps and sites where you can.
Um, gamble on plain poker, or you can even do roulette on your phone, things like that.
So, what they're finding is that if they can get someone to do sports gambling on their phone, it's pretty easy to then advertise online casino gambling, online roulette gambling, online slot machine gambling.
Now, here's a staggering number.
Um, let me make sure I read this because it is worth reading exactly to get it right.
Um, Shoot, here it is.
Okay, so gambling, sports gambling used to be seen as a slow form of gambling.
You had to go out to a racetrack, a horse track, or something like that.
It would take an afternoon, you'd place a couple bets, and you'd go home.
Now it's become a form of fast gambling, like pulling a slot machine.
So the online apps and the phone apps get people used to this quick gambling, and then they transition them into slot machines or online poker.
Things like that.
Now, gambling companies, if they get someone to convert from sports betting to casino betting online, they see a 500% return on investment of 500% if they convert a sports better into a casino gambler.
And so if they can get someone who's just doing it to be with the guys, betting on the Super Bowl, something like that, if they get them into opening their phone in the middle of the night, pulling on a digital slot machine, something like that, Their cost goes up incredibly.
And that's really the ease of access one that we've been alluding to for a while is really the most devastating thing here.
You know, to be honest, if you've got a group of guys, they've got a poker night, everyone brings $50, they hang out, the winner takes all, walks home with $250, something like that.
They do that once a month.
It's probably not the end of the world, right?
You take a trip to Vegas.
I don't really like Vegas.
I don't really see the appeal, but you've got a budget, you go.
Okay, you want it?
Like, I can't.
Fine.
The concern for me with Vegas would be like the other forms of lewdness.
Agreed.
Agreed.
But you pull open your phone in the middle of the night and you're getting a text.
So this is where it gets really shady.
If you sign up for these services, you start getting notifications, you start getting text messages, you start getting emails that say things like, LeBron James is about to shoot a free throw.
Do you want to bet $5 right now?
Yes, I do, real quick before he gets that free throw in.
And so you're getting hammered with emails, with text messages, with notifications on your phone.
Then you get into the casino gambling.
You pull up your phone in the middle of the night, you know, feeling lucky.
Oh, sure.
Oh, shoot.
Three hours later, you've just spent $6,000 on your casino app.
The ease of access is really the most, well, one of the most concerning things.
So here's a couple of things for the listener to be aware of.
And these have been criticisms of some of these online apps.
They involve a sign up process that is frictionless and often lacks age verification or effective age verification.
All you have to do is press, yes, I'm over 18.
Right.
That's the only age verification or 21 in some states.
It says that it will allow you to gamble a lot of money, but make it very hard for you to set a maximum amount.
Like if you know that you don't want to spend more than $20 on a day, to find that setting is three or four or five different screens deep.
But if you want to, right as soon as you open it up, gamble $40 right away, it'll do that very easily.
So the ease of gambling compared to the Difficulty of setting up safeguards and things like that.
It's like the same thing with Instagram, like when people try to limit their time, the app is not incentivized to limit time to show you less advertisers.
So they're never going to build in a strong, like, hey, we're starting the day off.
Do you want 10 minutes?
That'll be all we give you.
It'll maybe give some suggestions, but that's about it.
Yes.
There have been pushes to require that users have a minimum amount in their bank account.
Like, so if their bank account goes below $1,000 or something like that, they can't use the betting app anymore.
And those have been largely Turned away.
These companies don't care if someone's bank account is dwindling a thousand, five hundred, two hundred.
Now we're negative, you know, $120.
There's no like people have asked them to build in those safeguards and they've been very resistant and reluctant to do so.
Um, prompts to place another bet appear immediately as soon as you play.
So you get the text message about LeBron James shooting the free throw, yes.
And then immediately the app opens up and you've got, oh, this other game is going on and this game.
And yet last week you bet on this hockey game.
And so it's just this endless, it's kind of like the way casinos are designed to keep you in.
They're a maze getting out.
These are built into the phones now.
The apps are designed with the colors and the dopamine hits.
There's little micro, like you placed five bets, you get an extra $5 for free.
And you earn all these rewards by the more bets you place, things like that.
Casinos, it's the lighting, it's the temperature, it's the design on the carpets, all these different things, like all the way down to the carpet.
And then some casinos historically have even pumped higher amounts of oxygen in the HVAC.
Oh, interesting.
To keep you more alert so that you don't get tired and want to go home for fatigue.
Don't fall asleep.
You have money to lose.
Yeah.
So, like, at every single level, I mean, another common element of casinos is there's no windows.
Right.
So you can't see, like, the sun's going down or the sun's coming up.
Coming up.
It went down and came up, and I didn't notice.
Right.
Yep.
And so it's the same concept.
It is the same concept.
I'm going to close at least my portion of this by just, I'm going to read this to make sure I get it right.
So this is, to be fair, it's correlation, it's not causality.
Okay.
We don't know if there's a definite cause between these two.
But here's something from a study that was done by Northwestern University.
By the end of their sample period, so they tested households in states where, or they followed households in states where gambling, online sports gambling was made legal.
By the end of their sample period, researchers saw that nearly 8% of households were involved in gambling.
Previously zero, now 8%.
These bettors, on average, spent $1,000 per year on online bets.
The amount of money people put into legal sports gambling rose.
While it rose, their net investments fell by nearly 14%.
For every one, this is crazy.
And again, it's correlation, not causality, but for every $1 a household spent on betting, it put two fewer dollars into savings and investments, which that's very interesting, right?
So not only are you losing the money, but you're also not then doing something with the money to get a return on it.
The researchers also found that this greater access to sports gambling increased general participation in lottery games outside of sports betting, particularly among households that frequently overdraw their bank accounts.
This, they note, raises concerns about the amplification of risk-taking behavior.
So, the sports betting leads to lottery, leads to casino, things like that.
Last thing, overall, these changes to people's spending patterns led to decreased credit availability, increased credit card debt, and a higher incidence of overdrawing from bank accounts.
The researchers note that the effects were particularly acute among households that were least able to afford it, pushing them even deeper into debt.
Wow.
That's really sad.
Any final thoughts from you, Wes?
Not really.
No.
Yep.
Well, there you have it, kids.
Stay away from gambling.
But, you know, a larger theological application is we do, we have to think through the state.
If we're going to have a Christian theology of government and the state, that's something that we really have to think through because I think some of the old tropes that we would wheel out, you know, historically of just, you know, libertarianism, get off my lawn, just a small state.
Yeah, like, yes, the state shouldn't be a managerial state that's holding every single citizen's hand, you know.
Through, you know, we don't, you know, the state is bloated, don't get me wrong.
But there are other areas where it's actually too small.
I think that for me, that's one of the big takeaways is, and not just from today, but over the last couple of years as I've thought about this, is I think if we had a Christian state, it would be significantly smaller and in some cases non existent in some areas.
And then it would actually shock us in how big it would be in other areas that actually do fall under its God given jurisdiction.
It actually pertains to thwarting the evildoer.
And I think that gambling is one.
One of many examples of something that the state has to police, that it has to.
Well, and just to add on to that, it wouldn't necessarily mean that the state had to be bigger.
It would wield more authority, right?
It would say this is against the law.
And obviously, there would have to be some enforcement mechanism.
That's what I mean.
I know what you mean, but my point is what we're saying is the state needs to wield authority in the proper areas, which might mean it's influencing life in areas that we're not used to, but that doesn't necessarily mean they need.
120,000 armed anti gambling agents going out, right?
Like, it wouldn't take much to make it illegal.
Can you crack down on a few people, throw the book at them, and then that's it, you know?
That's true.
Yep.
Yep.
That's true.
Yep.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thank you guys for tuning in, and we will see you next time.