Betting Against Your Neighbor

At a semiannual conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, D. Todd Christofferson—one of the Church’s most senior leaders—declared forcefully that “gambling is morally wrong.” He pleaded with church members to abandon this destructive practice, to “live life on a higher plane.” His concern went beyond the individual dangers of gambling and extended to how the practice conditions the gambler to view his neighbor. Guidance from leaders like Christofferson is taken by the faithful to be spiritually imperative.

Christofferson’s remarks come at a time when online gambling is rampant. By his lights, three online markets have contributed to the craze: online sports betting, online casino-type games, and prediction markets. What once was a confined activity, practiced only in designated spaces like casinos, is now constantly available, everywhere we go, on our smartphones. This makes the corrosive effects of gambling all the more pernicious, according to Christofferson. 

While the Church has long explicitly opposed gambling, Latter-day Saints—especially young ones—have not been immune to these trends. Perhaps this is because church leaders have not addressed gambling directly since 2005, when today’s college-aged Latter-day Saints were either yet to be born or infants. 

The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, whose long-form essay about his yearlong experiment with online gambling is quoted in Christofferson’s talk, has been speaking on Utah college campuses. He observed that “many of the [LDS] students I met don’t think about gambling in moral terms at all; some don’t even consider sports betting or prediction markets to be gambling.” An Instagram Reel of college-aged men lamenting during Christofferson’s talk, captioned “Every LDS guy [right now],” has over 3.8 million views and 100,000 likes.

Christofferson’s address supplies the “moral terms” those students are lacking. Individuals are corroded by the desire at gambling’s core: seeking “something for nothing.” It can lead individuals down the dark road of addiction and financial ruin, and all this at the expense of worthier pursuits.

These arguments are not new. In the ancient world, gambling was associated with insobriety and unseriousness. Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, was embarrassed to be caught gambling in front of his trusted generals. The Romans likewise considered gambling a vice, and they strictly regulated the practice. Early Americans also discouraged gambling. As both Christofferson and Coppins note, George Washington called gambling “the child of avarice, the brother of inequity, and father of mischief.”

But Christofferson’s concern goes beyond how gambling affects the individual. He worries that it affects the way the gambler relates to his neighbor. Gambling is built on the premise that gain “comes at others’ expense,” and this, according to Christofferson, is “hard to reconcile . . . with the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves.” At the root of Christofferson’s teaching is an objection to instrumentalizing others: Gambling conditions the gambler to see others as sources of gain rather than as individuals of moral worth. A good life, he says, involves “being and doing better without others doing worse.” Gambling inverts this relationship, since one can only profit if someone else loses—and the entire industry, of course, is “built on its customers losing money.” 

In Coppins’s season of sports betting, he found that athletes became a sort of “subhuman extra” in the gambler’s personal drama. At least one athlete told him about receiving death threats for underperforming. After an untimely fumble cost him a bet, even Coppins found himself feeling an “irrational hatred” for a running back—a human being—he’d never met. 

This insight, too, rests on a rich intellectual tradition. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle described “gamesters” as gaining “something from their friends to whom they ought to give.” Aquinas echoes these concerns, observing that the gambler “preys” on his friends.

This is not to say that every gambler instrumentalizes his neighbor, but it is what the system invites. Indeed, Christofferson acknowledges that there may well be individuals strong enough to avoid these pitfalls, to engage in the occasional wager just for fun, without avarice and without instrumentalization. But wouldn’t others look to such a person “as a guide for upright living”? Couldn’t even this seemingly innocent fun lead a “weaker brother or sister” into temptation? Christofferson invokes the Apostle Paul: “take heed lest by any means this liberty of yours become a stumblingblock to them that are weak.”

Gambling, then, is morally corrosive to both individuals and communities. Quoting an earlier talk by Dallin H. Oaks, the president of the Church, Christofferson contrasts “the giving path of Christ” with “the taking path of the adversary.” Taking something from someone else “without giving value in return,” Oaks says, is “destructive of spiritual sensitivities.” How we view and treat others—whether as individuals of infinite moral worth or as instruments for gain—forms who we become. 

Prediction markets starkly reveal the gamification of human interaction. Christofferson’s list of what can be wagered on runs from interest rates to wildfires to the timing of the Second Coming. Coppins found contracts, or tradeable bets, on drug-boat bombings and on whether Gaza would experience a famine. To trade such a contract is to treat someone’s tragedy as a position—an opportunity to make a buck. This, Christofferson stresses, is different from investing, in which “the returns on investment come from the creation of value to others.” The faithful should be “anxiously engaged” in good causes, not anxiously checking their three-leg parlays. A market in other people’s misfortune—or even just future events—invites us to be cynical observers rather than active participants in the world, valuing money and the thrill of winning over neighborly love and constructive engagement. 

The danger of gambling, then, is not that we might lose money; it’s that we may learn to see the world as a series of opportunities for gain, and our neighbors as instruments in that pursuit. Christ, says Christofferson, calls us to something else: not to seek profit from what happens to others, but to seek their good. For Latter-day Saints, the path forward is clear. Gambling, including prediction markets, is morally unacceptable. Other religious leaders would do well to follow Christofferson’s example.