On July 13, Alberta expanded its online gambling offerings, opening up commercial iGaming to private companies. Advocates argued allowing more gambling operations would curb black-market gambling while ensuring the Alberta government would receive a cut—the same argument made in Ontario when it launched private sportsbooks in 2022, after single-event sports betting was decriminalized in 2021.
Leading political parties in Quebec are also pledging to similarly expand their online gambling offerings.
Alberta’s legalization provides an opportunity to examine what the Scriptures teach on this topic, how Canada’s gambling landscape has changed, and what we have learned from Ontario’s experiment.
Gambling in the Bible?
Scripture contains several examples of casting lots, from the division of the Promised Land, to Jonah on his troubled ship, to the soldiers dividing Jesus’ clothing. But these are not examples of gambling in the modern sense. The participants are using lots to make a decision or divide property; they are not risking their possessions in the hope of winning someone else’s.
Scripture does not address modern gambling directly. It does, however, give us principles by which Christians can evaluate it.
The first point to consider is the effective stewardship of the resources God has given us. In Titus 1, Paul, when discussing the requirements for church elders, writes,
While we are not all necessarily called to be elders, we are all called to wise stewardship. In a similar vein, you can think of warnings from both Paul and Peter to be sober minded—gambling addiction can be as serious as substance addiction, and the Bible cautions against addiction on multiple occasions.
Gambling is structured around the pursuit of gain through chance rather than productive labour, and it readily appeals to desires for quick wealth that Scripture repeatedly warns against.
On that subject, Paul reminds Timothy that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Tim. 6:10), and the writer of Hebrews encourages us to “keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have” (Heb. 13:5). Pursuing wealth in this way also ignores how God ordinarily provides for his people through faithful labour and wise stewardship rather than through the pursuit of windfalls.
The second point is that gambling is “win-lose”—for you to win someone else must lose, and vice versa. This is where gambling violates another biblical principle: that of human dignity. We each carry innate worth as children and image bearers of God, and if your accumulation of wealth comes at someone else’s expense in an exploitive way you are harming your neighbour and failing to promote your neighbour’s good.
A third point to consider is the warnings of Solomon in Proverbs: that “wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it” (Prov. 13:11) and that “everyone who is hasty comes only to poverty” (Prov. 21:5). Solomon also reminds us in Ecclesiastes, particularly chapter 5, that wealth is fleeting and can never satisfy, which is part of the addictive trap of gambling. Don’t bet on finding satisfaction and a flourishing life in a casino.
The Fundamental Problem With Gambling
At its core, gambling, because it severs the connection between wealth and work, runs contrary to the biblical vision for wealth and work. In Scripture, the mandate to work comes before the fall—to develop the world for God’s glory and others’ good. But gambling is chance, not work. It attempts to tempt providence, and, because it is always zero sum, does not multiply or create anything of value. It always subtracts from someone.
Those arguing that gambling is acceptable within a Christian worldview might point to the three stewards of Matthew 25, two of whom invest their master’s money and get a return while the third buries the money and receives wrath.
While the parable’s primary purpose is to teach faithful stewardship of everything God entrusts to us, it nevertheless assumes that faithful servants use their master’s resources productively rather than leaving them idle. Investment creates wealth, while gambling simply redistributes it. There are countless productive ways to generate wealth that better reflect biblical principles of diligence, stewardship, and service to others than risking resources on games of chance.
The Christian faith does not condemn financial risk as such. Investment also puts capital at risk in the hope of a return, but it does so in a way that is both productive and cooperative. You are seeking to gain by providing something for someone. Gambling takes from one in order to give to another.
Recent Developments and Their Effects
Since 2020, a number of public voices have stressed the harms associated with gambling, governments’ growing dependence on gambling revenue, and the disproportionate burden those harms place on certain segments of society.
Take, for instance, sports gambling, which disproportionately affects young men. The rapid expansion of sports betting in Canada has seriously harmed young men’s financial and psychological health. In Ontario, gambling-related contacts to the mental health addictions helplines for men and boys aged 15 to 24 have increased by 337 percent compared with levels prior to private online gambling legalization.
It’s now estimated about one in three young adults in Canada gamble online. Contrary to what advocates predicted, the establishment of a legal gambling market greatly increased the amount of gambling activity happening in Ontario.
Since Ontario’s launch of private online gambling, losses on the average active player account have reached $329 per month. Note that gamblers may have multiple accounts across different gambling platforms, which makes that data a conservative estimate of how much people are actually losing.
The Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction states that players should not spend more than 1 percent of pre-tax household income on gambling, which in Ontario would total $89 per month, a lot less than the current average activity happening per gambling account.
At the level that Ontarians are gambling, they are between four and five times more likely to experience financial harm, relational harm, emotional or psychological harm, and harm from health problems related to gambling.
The Canadian experience mirrors US data, which shows credit scores decline by approximately 0.3 percent in states that offer legalized sports betting. Where sports betting can be accessed online, the effect is nearly three times as large. Bankruptcy rates go up by 25 to 30 percent three to four years after online betting is legalized. Debt collections increase by 8 percent and debt consolidation loans, the loans that people are using to try to manage their debt, increase by 10 percent.
A Predatory Tax on the Poor
My concern with gambling, however, predates the recent expansion of sports betting. Cardus, the Christian policy think tank I help to lead, conducted earlier research that focused on another group disproportionately affected by gambling: lower-income households.
In the bottom income quintile—that is, the lowest-earning fifth of Ontario’s families—the average household spends almost 5 percent of its after-tax income on gambling each year, which is nearly three times what the highest quintile spends. While some of that government revenue gets funnelled back into social programs, it is a pittance and more window dressing than effective policy. As a tax, gambling is regressive, taking more from the poor than from the rich relative to income.
We must also attend to the political question that arises with gambling. Leaders are called to do justice for the good of all and their policies—including those related to tax and revenue—should be just. Gambling is not. It preys upon the very people the state is called to protect—the poor—and it does so in a way that removes the democratic process whereby citizens, through voting and other means, hold the government accountable.
Most importantly, gambling, particularly in Ontario, tends to work on a 10-year cycle of liberalization, commercialization, and decline. The government is no longer meeting existing demand safely but creating demand, trying to eke more cash out of the population.
These efforts to boost gambling revenue consistently fail to pay off in the long term. The province’s relentless pursuit of profit has come at the expense of its population’s welfare. It is past time for governments to admit they have a gambling problem.
The Bottom Line
The hardships associated with gambling are concerns for the flourishing of society as a whole. They also raise serious questions about governments that increasingly depend on gambling revenue, particularly when that revenue comes disproportionately from vulnerable people. Christians have good reason to oppose policies that encourage these harms and to advocate for laws that protect the common good.
Scripture gives us further reasons to question gambling itself. We are called to exercise wise stewardship over the resources God entrusts to us (Matt. 25:21), to cultivate contentment rather than pursue quick riches (1 Tim. 6:6-8), and to love our neighbours as ourselves (Mark 12:31). Gambling encourages the pursuit of wealth through chance, often at the expense of others, while exposing participants to temptations that can undermine self-control and faithful stewardship.
These principles should inform our personal choices as well as our expectations of public policy. A society in which families can flourish, people can exercise their gifts through productive work, and governments protect the vulnerable is one worth pursuing. Christians should be especially mindful of how their own use of money and the policies they support contribute to that vision.
