Who wins at gambling?

Consider a true story: “Margie” is a 42-year-old bank officer, well-educated, a wife and the mother of a college-age daughter. She is also a compulsive gambler. Margie did not always have a gambling problem. On their Las Vegas honeymoon, she and her husband dismissed gambling as a waste of time and money. Twenty years and a few Las Vegas vacations later, and with a new casino within an hour’s drive, Margie had exhausted all her credit cards and dipped into her daughter’s college tuition fund to support her habit of gambling. Her life fell apart in eight months and she found herself contemplating suicide.

A couple of years ago, the Catholic Bishops of Illinois took a look at how gambling has grown in our state and issued a pastoral letter. We wrote: “Gambling is not immoral in itself but may become so in certain circumstances. As gambling in our state increases, so also does the number of people whose passion for gambling is enslaving them.”

It’s sometimes hard for Catholics to find their voice about gambling, because gambling itself is not intrinsically wrong. Like drinking alcohol, its morality depends on context and circumstances. It’s one thing to have a glass of wine with supper. It’s another to drink to intoxication and beat your children or use your car as a lethal weapon. The first way of consuming alcohol is without moral problem, unless one is an alcoholic; the second way of using alcohol is destructive of self and others and immoral.

The case is much the same with gambling. A game of chance, a game of cards with friends and family, even a bingo game with moderate stakes as a way to pass an evening’s time is morally different from gambling organized as big business or widespread gambling sponsored by the state itself. Catholics as a whole would be slow to give up the conviction that gambling is not wrong as long as it does not go to excess and does not lead to wrongdoing in the use of money and possessions. Yet the same Catechism of the Catholic Church that teaches, “Games of chance are not in themselves contrary to justice” also points out that “The passion for gambling risks becoming an enslavement.” (CCC 2413).

Gambling has taken on a new face in our society. With state and interstate lotteries, with legalized gambling on an unprecedented scale, gambling has become big business. Would-be millionaires line up to buy lottery tickets at the local supermarkets while busloads of retired people travel to casinos on Indian reservations and on riverboats. The billions of dollars raised by state-sponsored gambling are a substitute for the taxes lawmakers are afraid to levy. But there are personal and social consequences.

The consequences for individuals are clear in the growing number of those known to be addicted. Gambling which begins as a pleasant form of recreation for many people can become, for about one out of 50 “social gamblers”, a controlling influence in their lives and in the lives of their families. Gambling is a personal problem when the excitement of the game and the escape from the pressures of everyday life, with the hope of winning big, become obsessive. An individual problem becomes a family problem when the gambler loses the grocery money or the cash for the children’s braces or the money for the house payment. The problem becomes social when a large gambling institution becomes a center for drug-dealing or for prostitution. As one member of the Archdiocesan Pastoral Council, the father of a young boy, remarked to me, “I won’t mind so much if my son, when he is adult, flies to Las Vegas and gambles there. But, when he’s 13 years old, I wouldn’t want to raise him here, if he could get on his bicycle and get caught up in the false excitement of a gambling casino.”

At the very least, gambling calls for honesty and self-scrutiny. People who know the difference between entertainment and addiction normally set aside a certain sum of money for playing various games and do not go beyond what they have set aside. A gambler who is quite open and honest with friends and family and associates about his or her play is safe. But self-deception can creep in, and the game of denial begins, a game which the gambler inevitably loses. The social gambler begins lying to himself and others and finds himself unable to stop.

There are programs for addicted individuals, adaptations of the marvelously effective 12-step programs first developed for alcoholics. There are still no programs for a society becoming dependent on revenue from gambling for meeting the needs of schools and hospitals and other necessary social services. There is something inappropriate if not downright dishonest in the State’s using gambling to balance the books. People do not always realize that all forms of gambling are ways of making money not for the people who gamble but for the people running the gambling enterprise, whether private or public. The “House” always wins, at least in the long run.

Besides personal addiction and governmental dependence on gambling, there is the problem of gambling creating a culture of distraction. When a society uses many of its resources to distract people and encourages them to waste their time and resources, people’s attention is turned from the sufferings of others, from the injustices of the social order at home and abroad, from the care of the sick and the poor, from even raising the question about what kind of people we are becoming. In their pastoral letter, the Catholic Bishops of Illinois asked for “a public examination of the impact of gambling upon the poor and upon the political process itself.”

“Margie”, the woman I mentioned at the beginning of this column, is receiving help for her gambling addiction. She has a chance to save her marriage and family, her career and her life. It’s less certain that the state can give up its dependence on gambling and that all of us can develop a society whose stability does not depend upon distracting its people from the purpose of life—to serve God in the service of others (see Mt. 25: 31-46). That’s how the game of life is finally won. Let’s pray for wisdom and prudence in meeting this challenge together. God bless you.

 

Top

---