I happened to listen to a recent Family Life Network (FLN) piece on gambling. This is a frequently visited topic as it concerns both New York and Pennsylvania, the network's listening area. Both states have in recent years opened up online betting and New York and Pennsylvania have both been involved in casino expansion. In New York, the Indian reservations have become popular venues, while Pennsylvania has allowed some casinos to open up in the Poconos and there are a few horse racing venues in the state.
As they have a weekly show that focuses on state and national politics this often comes up. But they also have a weekly interview with a 'Christian Counselor' who has touched on it, and other times there's a special segment that deals with various topics, including this one.
The most recent installment involved the typical Evangelical-pragmatic approach. It focused on the results of gambling - the financial straits for example and then connected this to binge drinking and episodes of domestic violence. In other words, if you gamble, you're likely to fall into this behaviour or are at risk.
I found this rather odd because not only is gambling a sin, but the behaviours described are wholly incompatible with Christian conduct. This isn't just someone having a 'slip up'. They're describing situations in which people are given over to sinful behaviour and being dominated by it. The line of reasoning is odd to say the least.
Rather than focus on pragmatic results like bad marriage, money trouble, and health problems, wouldn't it be more to the point to say that people engaged in such behaviour need to repent? If they're Christians (and I would assume the audience would be in some capacity) then they need to be held to account by the Church. We don't obey God because it helps us to have our best life now - we obey God because it's right and as regenerate people we hate sin.
Eventually (albeit briefly) the piece spoke of sin and a need for repentance but never explained why or specified that gambling itself is sinful. It's not a legitimate way to make money. It's foolish and wasteful and rooted in covetousness. These notions were not touched on.
But for these Evangelicals the sin (it would seem) can't really be separated or explained apart from the fact that it's just a bad decision for your life - and arguments along those lines.
At no time was it suggested that sin is rebellion against God and an affront to Him. The tendency (and it's something I often note coming from these circles) is to turn sin into a personal struggle or problem instead of understanding it as disobeying the commands of God - which results in a course of death and the threat of apostasy.
But I also reflected on the fact that this message is difficult to sell given the syncretism between Evangelicalism and Capitalist thinking and attitudes about money and riches. The culture teaches easy money ethics (by exploitation or sleight of hand) and glosses over the speculative, manipulative, and deceitful nature of Wall Street and its deeply anti-Christian values. The sold-out to mammon American Church cannot reckon with this. Gambling in our cultural context seems as American as apple pie. This touches on a larger problem concerning American Christianity and its rejection of New Testament teaching about money and the fact that you cannot serve God and mammon. What is gambling but a reckless quest for it? And how can a Christian put their trust in luck or chance? Will they pray for the dice to land on the right numbers or the right card to be dealt to them? It's absurd and sadly Evangelicalism demonstrates that due to its worldliness, its watered down faith, and its deep compromise, it cannot properly deal with this issue.
Interestingly this would be one point in which the older Fundamentalism would have some tools to work with. While they hardly developed a real robust understanding of wealth and ethics, the movement understood something of antithesis and that Christians were not going to be the movers and shakers in the world. Money was secondary and thus it had some standing on these issues and in the larger ethos of the movement.
But by the end of World War I and the first Red Scare this began to change. And certainly at the end of World War II, the change started to become permanent and transformative. The new Evangelical movement was emerging and the fear of communism drove this movement into alliance with the Republican Party. It would take a generation for everything to coalesce. Fundamentalism didn't just go away. As I've talked about many times, my wife and I grew up in churches that were hybrids - part Fundamentalist and part Evangelical in their spirit and approach to Christian living. Even the early CCM movement (a fruit of Evangelicalism) still retained something of the antithesis that comes out in the songs of the 1970's and 1980's.
But by the 1980's, the Fundamentalist impulse had more or less succumbed to the Evangelical and the old Fundamentalists and Evangelicals of the South who had for so long been allied to the Democratic Party (due to the Civil War), had begun in earnest to migrate to the GOP in the aftermath of Civil Rights. They made their way into the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan - encouraged by leaders like Jerry Falwell. And with this shift, the transition to mammonism was complete and so necessary for these poor misguided souls that confused godliness with gain. As a group in quest of political power, money wasn't just helpful, it was necessary and became an end in itself.
Contemporary gambling culture is a result of this mammonism and the decadence it has now produced. It is a crisis and an Evangelical movement that struggles to define what Christianity is (apart from a Cheap Grace gospel) and what Christian ethics looks like (which don't really mean much in a Cheap Grace context), is wholly inadequate to deal with the problem. When one factors in the total embrace and acceptance of cultural values regarding money, usury, profit, litigation, and much else, there's really little left to say and this was painfully on display in this FLN segment.
A return to the Bible will require a complete rethinking, overhaul, and reform of Christian thinking and doctrine and it will result in a turning away from the likes of FLN and the Evangelical movement they represent. They profess to know God but in works deny Him.
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