Silent Killers and Silent Christians

What do you think–is gambling a sin?

In his massive book on The Doctrine of the Christian Life, John Frame argues that gambling is often wrong, but not always.  He says gambling can be linked to the worship of chance; it can be addictive; it can involve covetousness; it can be a waste of time and money; it can be thought of as a substitute for useful work; and it can fall under the control of organized crime.  So although Frame doesn’t think gambling is sinful in all circumstances it “is often or generally sinful, given the conditions in which we live” (806-807).

Even if plunking down ten dollars in the office pool may be harmless, the gambling industry certainly isn’t.  And Christians ought to do more to speak against it.

Anyone unsure about the negative affects of the gaming industry and the sophisticated tools they use to entice addictive behavior should read Maura Casey’s devastating essay, Gambling with Lives, in First Things.

What can casinos, like the garish new Firekeepers Casino down the road from me, do to your community?  Here’s Casey:

The Atlantic City beat cops spoke frankly about the rise in crime they witnessed after the casinos opened in the late 1970s, and others were equally blunt about the decline in the number of local businesses, the continued decay of urban neighborhoods, and the stubbornly high unemployment in the wake of casino gambling. Subsequent studies would later prove the point: In 1976, when New Jersey voters approved casino gambling in Atlantic City, unemployment in the city was 14.7 percent; in 1997, it was 12.7 percent. During those two decades, the number of locally owned businesses in Atlantic City dropped by half.

What can casinos do to your personal life?

A friend of mine told me that to escape the burdens of motherhood she would go to the casinos at 2 A.M. to gamble until 6:30 A.M., when she would go back home and get her kids ready for school. Until the day she didn’t go home in time—unable to stop playing the slots. A worried state legislator called to tell me her husband emptied her sixteen-year-old son’s college fund to gamble at the casinos. A bank manager told me about a customer who inherited $1 million and—aided by using the ATM machines at the casino to withdraw money—gambled it all away. A woman who worked at my daughter’s day care moved her family to Florida in a desperate attempt at a geographic cure after her husband drained money from his ten-year-old’s savings account and couldn’t stop going to the area casinos.

So why haven’t more civic, political, and religious leaders spoken out against the gambling industry in an effort to stop its expansion?  Again, Casey:

Part of the reason that gambling spread so far and so fast is that the industry markets its product as just another form of harmless fun. In a brilliant move, the industry coined the term gaming as the euphemism of choice. Organized religion was slow to challenge the spread and, even today, rarely speaks out. Most of all, government has become predatory in its use of gambling as a worry-free method of increasing revenue without raising taxes. Indeed, the states have moved from granting permission to cheerleading. Government boosterism has legitimized gambling, eroding what few moral scruples remained on the part of average people against engaging in a behavior that, just a few decades ago, would have been considered largely unacceptable.

In addition, the positive impact of casinos—thousands of jobs, construction spending—is simple to measure, lending itself to triumphant press coverage and promises of easy prosperity. In Connecticut, the casinos are credited with creating 30,000 jobs directly and indirectly. But putting a price tag on the social costs tied to gambling has proved a more complicated task. What price should we pay for addiction, embezzlement, child neglect, increased debt, drunken driving, and suicide, as well as for the prevalence of problem gambling? Governments duck the challenge. Even Connecticut, which to its credit has produced several gambling studies over the past thirty years (the most recent of which came out in June), has consistently refused to tally the total social cost of gambling.

But, you may ask, aren’t the addicts to blame for their problems?  So some people don’t know when to stop.  Why does that make the whole industry suspect?

Decades ago it was widely assumed that gambling addiction took fifteen or twenty years to develop in men (and gamblers were once nearly all male). But those were the days when the primary pursuits of gamblers were such games as craps, roulette, poker, blackjack, or even betting on horses. In this context, the long time necessary for addiction to develop made sense. How often could a gambler bet on a horse? Or a sports team? At most, the event frequencies of the average gambler would occur perhaps fifty or a hundred times a day.

That may sound like a lot, until you consider the slot machine, the modern marvel that has done more to spread gambling than any other invention in history—which has been compared, understandably, to crack cocaine. An experienced gambler can bet 600 to 900 times an hour on a modern slot machine. That’s a lot of event frequencies, and the main reason that people are becoming addicted in far less time. This is especially true of women, who, unlike those in previous eras, are now as likely to gamble as men.

For reasons that are not clear, women take less time than men to develop addiction. Female casino customers are more likely to avoid competitive games than are men and are often drawn to casinos by a desire for escape, which slot machines facilitate. Experts say many women gamblers, who prefer slot machines, can become problem gamblers in just three to five years.

The slot machine, which is at the root of so much addiction, is responsible for 70 percent of the gambling revenue in Las Vegas—and the percentage is higher elsewhere. Slot machines are vacuum cleaners designed to swallow money, yet they remain among the least reported, least understood technological innovations influencing modern life.

So how do slot machines manipulate men and especially women into addictive behaviors?  Casey one last time:

Along the way, the casinos paid for considerable research into how to increase the length of time gamblers stay at the machine—since the longer that patrons play, the more they lose and the more casinos profit. The chairs at slot machines are ergonomically designed to be comfortable, with no hard edges that could decrease leg circulation, Schull observes. Screens slant at 38 degrees to prevent slouching. Game controls are within easy reach, as are computerized menus to have food and drink delivered without leaving the machine. Some have television monitors to keep players from exiting the area to catch their favorite shows. Slot machines have many different themes, mimicking game shows, cartoons, or favorite sitcoms. The sound of jingling coins, the bells, the volume of noise, the flashing lights are all designed to encourage patrons to play, and play, and play…

The real genius of the gambling industry was to combine B.F. Skinner’s work on operant conditioning with intense research on how and why gamblers play on the machines. Every casino has a rewards card (Foxwoods’ was once called the Wampum Card, but now it is called the Dream Card), which the gamblers insert into machines at the beginning of play. The gimmick is that, when customers use the cards, the casinos pay them a small amount for every hour they gamble and send them special offers, the value of which escalates the more they bet. In the process, casinos gain a treasure trove of information.The data culled from customer cards at Harrah’s, for example, helped the gambling chain amass a staggering database on 16 million gamblers. The casinos set calendars and budgets that predicted when certain gamblers would show up, how much they would spend, and their “lifetime value” to the company, according to Winner Takes All: Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, Gary Loveman and the Race to Own Las Vegas, the 2008 book by Christina Binkley. Company computers produced “behavior modification reports,” suggesting which gamblers would respond to the offer of a free hotel room and which ones would prefer free gambling chips. The computers measured the “velocity” of gambling based on how often gamblers hit the buttons on slot machines, and Harrah’s used the data to entice them to gamble even more. The company measured how often casino patrons visited, and it called them with free offers if the research indicated they were “overdue.” High rollers had always gotten such careful attention, but Harrah’s showed that paying attention to the low-rolling majority of gamblers would make casinos even more lucrative.

Slot machines have long been programmed to show “near misses” and give gamblers the impression that they came this close to winning, the better to encourage them to keep playing. The machines give back enough money in the process to make gamblers feel like winners even when they are losing. But Harrah’s developed the technique of intervening when reality began to dawn on gamblers—when they lost so much the experience was becoming negative. The company tracked, in real time, customers’ losing streaks and would send “luck ambassadors” to perk them up, give them a token gift—free lunch or some free credits on the machine— to reduce their perception of losing and keep them gambling longer…

Those who defend gambling say that it should be a matter of free will, just like any other adult habit. But when a customer is pitted against researchers armed with psychological techniques, marketing studies, and computer analyses of a patron’s own behavior for the express purpose of extracting ever larger amounts of money, how much choice is really involved?

Of course, addicts are still responsible for their choices, but Casey’s point is well-taken.  The slot-machine is not a toy, or as it is so often dubbed, a bit of harmless entertainment.  It is a learning machine intent on finding your weakness and exploiting it.  Casinos exist to take your money.  They make no product.  They do not create wealth.  They do not contribute to the public good.  They hurt communities, hurt families, and by design try to hurt people by making them into coin-dropping addicts. Christians interested in seeking the shalom of their cities should do what they can to oppose the proliferation of casinos, lotteries, and the rest of the gaming industry. They could start by not showing up.

It may seem like I’ve quoted the whole essay, but I haven’t.  Be sure to read the whole thing.