Peter Ladd: Christians don't care about gambling. Here's why you should.

Alex was a teacher. He was ‘responsible’ in every area of life but one. He was addicted to gambling. He started when he was 17. He would bet on anything. One weekend, he made a £127,000 profit through online gambling. He then lost the entire amount within 26 minutes, through 11 spins of a roulette wheel. He has lost friendships, jobs, and relationships. He no longer has any contact with his daughter. He said, “I'll never get back some of the relationships I lost and that's the hardest thing.”

Working in our Comms team at CARE, I get some insight into which of the different areas we work on connect most easily with supporters. It’s been a pretty consistent picture across our different channels, whether it’s social media, or our Friday emails. People are very engaged with topics like assisted suicide, abortion, and gender. They only click on the gambling stories rarely.

We once ran a survey for a section of our supporters, asking them to list their top three issues they cared about, from all of the areas in which we operate. 298 people filled it in. Over 100 people listed freedom of speech, or marriage, or abortion. More than 200 put assisted suicide. Only 9 said gambling.

A few months back I did some work with one of our Church Engagement team; he offers a wide range of talks which you can book for your church. The only one from his drop-down list he had never been asked to deliver? Gambling.

And in truth, I understand it. It’s taken me three years to really care about gambling.

But now I do care about it. And hopefully, by the end of this article, you will too!

Despite the lack of explicit teaching in the Bible on the topic (which doesn’t mean it has nothing to say!), Christians have generally opposed gambling. Clement of Alexandria (writing around the turn of the 3rd century AD) connected it with laziness; Tertullian declared it could put men into a frenzy. And an anonymous tract, called the De Aleatoribus speaks vehemently against Christians who play dice: “If you say you are a Christian when you are a dice-player, you say you are what you are not, for you are a partner with the world.”

Britain has only had licensed betting shops and casinos since the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act (which led to the expansion of the industry), but bookies and illicit gambling have existed here in the UK for centuries. The Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon, focusing on the all-consuming nature of gambling addiction, commented: “When a man takes to the gaming table, it seems as if his whole soul ran out at the sluice, and his entire life is just nothing to him. Wife, children, substance – all must go at the throw of the dice or be staked at the running of a horse.”

Perhaps the strongest denouncement of gambling I’ve found comes from the former Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, who listed a number of reasons why Christians should oppose the gambling industry (not just avoiding it personally, but objecting to its very principle): “Gambling challenges that view of life which the Christian Church exists to uphold and extend. Its glorification of mere chance is a denial of the Divine order of nature. To risk money haphazard is to disregard the insistence of the Church in every age of living faith that possessions are a trust, and that men must account to God for their use. The persistent appeal to covetousness is fundamentally opposed to the unselfishness which was taught by Jesus Christ and by the New Testament as a whole. The attempt (inseparable from gambling) to make a profit out of the inevitable loss and possible suffering of others is the antithesis of that love of one’s neighbour on which our Lord insisted.”

There are many reasons why a Christian might not choose to gamble themselves; but people might (reasonably!) ask why we care about other people not gambling either. After all, we are free agents, and all responsible for our own actions. We don’t police how people use their money. I remember watching an interview our very own James Mildred did with the GB News host Tom Harwood; Harwood kept asking questions along the lines of ‘Why are you trying to stop people having the occasional flutter?’ (which of course, we weren’t). It’s not a CARE policy to shut down the office World Cup sweepstake!

When thinking about this topic, I found these words from Paul to the Corinthians (admittedly, still a Christian context) helpful.

“‘I have the right to do anything,’ you say—but not everything is beneficial. ‘I have the right to do anything’—but I will not be mastered by anything.”

Just because we have freedom to do something, that doesn’t mean that it’s helpful for us to do it. Some people will be fine buying their National Lottery ticket, or putting down the occasional bet on the Derby. But for others, gambling is not a harmless past-time; some people are “mastered” by gambling; and it can do them real damage.

Alex’s story isn’t a one-off case; currently, over 400,000 UK adults directly experience gambling harm. Gambling harm is defined as a person developing a serious preoccupation with gambling which impacts on health, both mental and physical. It can lead to suicidal thoughts and developing other severe mental health problems. It manifests in different ways, but usually it impacts a family’s finances, a person’s ability to maintain employment, their relationships, their physical health, and for some, it can even lead to criminal activity.

Another 2 million people are deemed to be at risk of experiencing direct gambling harm. And for every person directly experiencing gambling harm, between 5 and 10 more experience it indirectly, through a spouse, a parent, or a child. Around 1.6 million children in the UK currently live in a household where an adult is experiencing direct gambling harm, according to GambleAware’s 2024 Treatment and Support Survey.

For the gambling industry to make a profit, someone has to lose. The US President Donald Trump summed it up aptly: “People think I'm a gambler. I've never gambled in my life. To me, a gambler is someone who plays slot machines. I prefer to own slot machines. It's a very good business being the house.”

The Bible is replete with warnings to the rich against exploiting the poor and the vulnerable. I will just reproduce a sample below:

Proverbs 14:31: “Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.”

Proverbs 22:22-23: “Do not exploit the poor because they are poor and do not crush the needy in court, for the Lord will take up their case and will exact life for life.”

Isaiah 32:7: “Scoundrels use wicked methods, they make up evil schemes to destroy the poor with lies, even when the plea of the needy is just.”

God cares about injustice, particularly towards the vulnerable. Nothing escapes his gaze. He spoke powerfully against the evil that was rife within Israel and Judah, particularly through his prophets, warning them that he would bring judgement upon them if they did not change their ways.

Amos 2:6-7 is representative of many other similar passages:

“This is what the Lord says:

“For three sins of Israel,
even for four, I will not relent.
They sell the innocent for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals.

They trample on the heads of the poor
as on the dust of the ground
and deny justice to the oppressed.”

When you investigate the behaviour of the gambling industry in the UK, it is difficult to think of an example which more accurately mirrors those warnings.

The gambling industry lines its pockets by inflicting misery on others. In the UK, it makes £15 billion in profit every year, through people losing money; the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once summed it up as follows: “In gambling the many must lose in order that the few may win.”

The industry deliberately targets people in poorer areas: betting shops and gambling machines are 10 times more likely to be located in deprived areas. Or it targets people already experiencing addiction. In the UK, approximately 86% of gambling companies’ profits is collected from just 5% of accounts.

And the industry deliberately targets those who are most addicted, to try and extract as much money from them as possible. Somewhere between 65% and 86% of gambling companies’ profits is collected from just 5% of accounts. It is in the interests of gambling companies to ensure that these accounts, generating high yields, are retained by the company and also that they continue to lose.

Gambling companies are meant to monitor spend and contact people who spend £2,000 over a year. The Gambling Commission has recently issued fines to gambling companies that permit uncontrolled rapid spend; however, the University of Liverpool found that accounts which had spent more than £2,000 in the space of a year, fewer than 1% of those account holders were contacted.

In 2023, the bookmaker William Hill was fined a record £19 million for a lack of distinct lack of social responsibility. One customer was allowed to open an account and spend £23,000 in just 20 minutes without any checks.

And for people who are addicted, the sheer volume of gambling ads makes it impossible to switch off from the source of their addiction. Take the football industry; people are finally starting to wake up to the dangers of sports-betting, and it has been encouraging to hear that from the beginning of the 2025/26 season, Premier League teams will be forbidden from displaying a betting company on the front of their shirts.

But there is so much more to be done; gambling sponsors still appear in other places on the players’ kit; ads will flash across the billboards; those watching the game on the tv will be subjected to adverts displaying live betting odds. Research from the Premier League’s opening weekend in 2024 indicates that 29,000 betting messages were shown. West Ham’s match against Aston Villa saw around 6,500 gambling-related ads alone.

As Christians, we care about people: every human is made “in the image of God”, and is of inherent dignity and value. We want to see people flourish, as we were created to do.

The lie of gambling is that it seems to offer the quick short-cut to flourishing, when in reality, it is far more likely to lead to destruction. The Canadian comedian Norm MacDonald summed up the attitude many people have towards it: “They call gambling a disease, but it's the only disease where you can win a bunch of money.”

Christians believe that all our resources are a gift from God, including our money, and are to be stewarded wisely. There is no quick fix towards prosperity (or at least, not normally); instead the Bible commends the values of hard work, discipline and financial prudence. Of course, there is no set formula to the prosperous life - our fallen world is far too complicated for that - but wise living will generally lead to improving one’s circumstances (and the same applies in reverse!). We read in Proverbs 13:11: “Dishonest money dwindles away, but whoever gathers money little by little makes it grow.”

58% of those gambling last year said ‘to make money’ was a common motivation for their gambling. In reality, the vast majority of bets result in money down the drain, and rather than people “gathering money little by little”, the addictive nature of gambling can easily look more like “losing money lots by lots”. A 2023 survey of people gambling between the ages of 18 and 24 found that 42% said they had taken financial risks in betting; 36% said they had either borrowed money or sold possessions to fund their bet. 39% experienced mental health problems; many more said they felt ashamed of what they were doing.

Gambling - and indeed, other forms of chasing after money - tends to have a knock-on effect upon more areas than just financial harm. We read in 1 Timothy 6: “Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”

The 2024 Gambling Survey for Great Britain found that of those aged 18-34 who had gambled in the last 12 months, more than 1 in 20 had reported a severe impact on their life. 1.9% of men had experienced a relationship breakdown as a result. 1.9% had lost something of significant financial value to themselves, like a home, a car, or even a business. 1.6% had experienced violence or abuse.

The Government’s 2023 economic analysis estimated that harmful gambling behaviours directly cost the government £412.9 million every year. The indirect impact of it (such as the impact on health, employment and education) was estimated at somewhere between £635 and £1,355.5 million, providing a combined estimate of approximately £1.05 to £1.77 billion. They then said that this figure was likely to be an underestimate.

In some extreme cases, gambling can even be a gateway towards self-harm. There is more than one suicide linked to gambling every single day in the UK. 44% of those directly experiencing gambling harms are classified as ‘at high risk of suicidal behaviour’, and research from Sweden suggests those struggling with gambling addiction are 15x more likely to take their own lives.

Luke Ashton, from Leicester, was married to Annie, and they had two children together. He was an avid Leicester City fan, and took his son to matches frequently. In 2018, he was drawn into gambling by introductory ‘free bet’ offers. Things spiralled quickly, and he accumulated debts of £18,000. He would tell Annie that when he was gambling, he was just trying to get enough money to pay back his loans, and that he hated doing it. With Annie’s support, he cleared the debts and closed his gambling accounts in 2019. During the pandemic, Luke was lured back into gambling by more ‘free bet’ bonuses. Later examinations of his betting records showed he gambled up to 100 times a day, including early in the morning and late at night when his wife was in bed. Luke took his own life in April 2021.

There is an irony in people who suggest that Christians who care about gambling and campaign for greater regulation are impinging upon human freedoms. For the reality is that for some people, what used to be freedom has turned into addiction, compulsion and slavery.

The slogan in the gambling ads goes, ‘When the fun stops, stop’. But it doesn’t just work like that for many people; they can’t just stop. Ironically, it was discovered that the use of that slogan actually increased the levels of gambling.

The bandleader Bert Ambrose once said, “You don’t gamble to win. You gamble so you can gamble the next day.” Gambling addiction is now so widespread that NHS England has set up 15 specialist clinics to help people recover. In 2021, they accepted 775 referrals. In 2025, that will quadruple to 3,000.

Addiction is not part of God’s better story for what human life should look like; as Christians, we believe that “it is for freedom that Christ has set us free”. Or think of Paul’s words to the Romans, as he describes the addictive nature of sin: “For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.”

Gambling addiction is particularly on the rise among younger people. The most common age group affected by gambling addiction in the UK is 18-34s. In 2022, more than 2,000 UK university students were surveyed on their betting habits: 71% said they'd gambled in the last twelve months. Of this number, 28% were found to be at "moderate risk" of developing a gambling addiction, and 24% were already exhibiting "problem gambling" behaviour. Half of the students surveyed said gambling had affected their university experience. More than one in ten had struggled to pay for food as a result of spending money on bets. 1.4% of those aged 16 to 24 are now officially classified as problem gamblers, up from 0.4% in 2023.

Gambling can be destructively addictive: the former England footballer Paul Merson first gambled when he was 16. He lost his £100 wages within ten minutes of entering a betting shop. He told his mum he had been mugged, and began a pattern of lying to family and friends. He estimates he lost £7 million during his playing career, He said: “I've been addicted to alcohol and cocaine, but the most destructive and only one I'm still struggling with is gambling.” In 2020 he lost his deposit to buy a house.

And gambling addiction in today’s world is vastly more difficult to escape than it was in a world before smartphones and online betting providers. Before the rise of internet betting, people could only place a bet when a physical shop was open. Now the online shop never closes.

Tim Keller once wrote: “Whatever controls us is our lord. The person who seeks power is controlled by power. The person who seeks acceptance is controlled by the people he or she wants to please. We do not control ourselves. We are controlled by the lord of our lives.”

People think that gambling is about freedom; the freedom to spend your money how you want, when you want; in reality, it’s slavery.

We care about gambling. But we don't want to just moralise from the sidelines, or to avoid gambling ourselves. We want to actively work against an industry which treats people made in God's image as cash-vehicles to be exploited.

In Proverbs 31:8-9, we read: “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.”

For more than a decade, CARE has been speaking up on this issue, and has played a part in setting people free, most notably through the creation of GAMSTOP, which helps people to self-exclude from all licensed gambling providers online. Self-exclusion was already a widely-accepted mechanism for protecting people from betting shops; if someone is concerned about their gambling habits they can request not to be served by that gambling provider for a minimum of six months. But it did not work online. With hundreds of gambling sites available at a click of a button, it would have been impossible for people to remove themselves from every website.

At CARE, we argued for the creation of a single tool that enabled people to register their self-exclusion with the Gambling Commission. During the passage of the Gambling Licensing and Advertising Bill CARE worked with parliamentarians to develop an amendment which would mandate the government to provide such a scheme. That amendment led to the creation of GAMSTOP, a multi-operator self-exclusion tool; launched in 2018, it allows users to choose to self-exclude for periods ranging from between six months to five years, and all licensed gambling websites are not entitled to contact them. As of 2025, the number of people who have registered and been helped by GAMSTOP reached over 550,000. January 2025 was the busiest month on record, with almost 10,000 people signing up in a single month.

And the government is finally starting to take gambling regulation more seriously: in 2024, the Labour Government announced plans to restrict the amounts people could lose in online slot betting, and introduced a mandatory levy on gambling companies, which will raise £100 million each year to help people suffering with gambling addiction.

But there is so much more to be done.

We are calling for that levy to be raised much higher, to 5% of gambling profits; at least £250 million is needed to pay for treatment; money is also needed for prevention and research.

We want to see an end to ‘free bet’ promotions, which are often targeted at people struggling with addiction, to tempt them back in to the fold.

We want to see greater use of affordability checks, which protect players from gambling-related harms, before they are allowed to place a bet.

We want to see proper regulation around gambling in Northern Ireland. The Gambling Act 2005 (and all subsequent legislation) does not apply in Northern Ireland, which remains an unregulated market. Northern Ireland makes up less than 3% of the UK population, yet almost 10% of people in gambling harm are located in the province. The rate of harm in Northern Ireland is 4.5x larger than the rate of harm in England.

And we want to see greater restrictions on loot boxes for under-18s: these are virtual items in video games that players can purchase or earn, containing a randomised selection of in-game items. Their contents are typically unknown until the loot box is opened, creating an element of chance. They are often available in games targeted at children, and are thought to increase the risk of young people taking up real-life gambling later.

We care about gambling. Because we care about the people gambling; the gambling industry is built on the misery of people like Alex and Luke Ashton. It’s built on loss and tearing people down; on greed and selfishness; on desperate risks and shattered hopes. It promises freedom, and it delivers slavery.

We believe in a better story; where people flourish. We want to see people set free. And we want to build a world in which injustice is broken and the powerless are protected. Because that’s the world which we believe our God will one day bring.