In advance of the Super Bowl, columnist Jana Riess explores where the LDS Church stands on sports betting.
On Sunday, as the Kansas City Chiefs battle the Philadelphia Eagles in the Super Bowl, many Americans will wager on the game for money. ESPN is reporting legal bets on the game should amount to $1.39 billion, to say nothing of the billions more that will be wagered informally .
Not a lot of wiggle room there. The church is clear that gambling is wrong, and doesn’t seem to make any distinction between dilettantes who play the lottery on occasion and hard-core gamblers who lose everything to full-blown addiction.What’s interesting is that a growing number of U.S. Latter-day Saints seem to be adopting more of a live-and-let-live approach to the question.
Some of the expected findings apply here. Latter-day Saints outside Utah are more accepting of gambling than those who live in the Beehive State; men are more accepting than women; and younger people are more accepting than the oldest respondents. But there’s another possible interpretation, and it’s the exact opposite of the secularization thesis, which is that in this matter, as in many others, Latter-day Saints are playing follow the leader. By this, I mean that even though the church’s anti-gambling policy has not changed and is clearly posted on its website, it hasn’t been emphasized for a long time.
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