Theology Applied THE LIVESTREAM - Betting Apps Are Targeting You And Your Family
Once upon a time, gambling was something done in back rooms and 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, lose.
For over a century, both American law and Christian conscience agreed: gambling was a vice. Not merely a private sin, but a public threat. It corrupted sports — from the 1919 Black Sox scandal to Pete Rose. It bankrupted homes. It bred addiction. So in 1992, 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 26 years — until the Supreme Court struck down PASPA in 2018. Since then, we’ve witnessed a cultural transformation: not a thoughtful reappraisal 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? 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 that 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 because gambling treats chance as profit, and profit as providence. It tempts us to see fortune as fate, and risk as recreation.
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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Today we trace the long Christian view of gambling — from biblical cleromancy to digital entrapment — and ask whether the modern church has fallen silent just as Mammon found a new app store. Let’s get into it.
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