Do Wesleyans Oppose Gambling? You bet!
Today’s twin
hot social issues are abortion & homosexual marriage; in the 1800s the twins were alcohol & gambling. Wesleyans
were founded in the 1800’s when most conservative Christians rejected all
alcohol and gambling just like today we reject abortion and homosexual
marriage.
In the 1800’s
alcohol and gambling were common ways workers squandered their entire week’s pay before
getting home on Friday night. The Women were left with nothing to buy food for
the family all the following week. Alcohol and gambling were seen as twin thieves
taking food out of the mouths of babies. They were considered social evils that
ruined fathers and husbands and when they were finished their work they sent
home a penniless husband drunk enough to beat his wife and children. Some desperate
mothers went to the factory pay booths to snatch some of their husband’s cash
before he could bet and drink it away that evening. Thus early Wesleyans got
fired up against alcohol and gambling like other conservative Christians of the
time. And they wrote rules about both into their church Manuals and Disciplines.
But
Wesleyans were not just opposed to gambling for the sake of wives and children—though
that would have been enough. They saw other reasons too. Since gaming was “fixed”
to the extent that the house always made money on average from customers it as
considered poor stewardship: putting
money in the bank to earn interest was better stewardship. But what about a poker
game between friends where there was no “house?” Here the phrase “ill gotten gain” came to play:
the way to earn money was by hard work not by the bad luck of others. Winning the
pot at poker on Friday might mean you got a huge sum of money—but you did so at
the expense of food for the kids of the men you outwitted. How could this
fulfill the royal law of love, they asked. Then the lottery or craps table
promised great hope—a
Christian’s hope for the future should be in a good God, not in good luck. For
these and other reasons Wesleyans (and most other conservative Christians of
the period) came to oppose gambling along with alcohol.
Like all prohibitions,
once gambling was black-listed the question became how far do you go? Riverboat
casinos and gambling halls where hard core and high stakes gambling occurred were
obviously out. Bingo and other social games of chance were quickly condemned
too. Eventually conservative Christians banded together to make many of the
Southern state’s lotteries illegal by the mid or late 1800s. Conservative Christians commonly refused to
participate in raffles, or office pools on sporting events, arguing that they
were essentially gambling in “betting” a dime or a quarter with the hope of
gaining a much larger sum. Churches who were careful to “avoid even the
appearance of evil” eschewed ever offering door prizes or prizes for anything
based on chance, like a drawing of names, even of the person had made no wager
but merely signed their name on a slip of paper.
Many conservatives
went further. When I was a child Wesleyans widely believed it was gambling
to invest any money in the stock market. By the 1960’s this conviction
diminished when Wesleyans had enough money to invest and advisors told them it
wasn’t gambling because the stock market “is a sure thing over time.” But even
when conservatives opened up to the stock market they continued to reject the
futures market, trading derivatives and any other kind of gambling like
investments.
My
grandfather went even further than this. He believed that paying $90 for
fire insurance on his house was a “bet” with the company. He was a godly Methodist
coal miner but he refused to make any “wagers” on insurance. He put the equivalent
money every year in the offering plate of his local church “trusting God to
protect the house.” The house never did catch fire. Besides fire insurance he
did the same with his health and life insurance premiums—putting the money in
the offering place and trusting God to be his insurer. Few folk today are this
radical in opposing gambling.
So where
are we today on gambling? Wesleyans still have it listed as a prohibition for
full members. While most of the heat has gone out of this reform movement in
the last hundred years there are still some folk who feel deeply about it. What
do you think? So here is what I’m trying to think about on
gambling:
1. What has changed
in the social situation since the 1800s so that some arguments no longer apply
to today’s gambling?
2. What of these
arguments still applies to today’s
gambling? Or are there new arguments?
3. How far should we go
today in forbidding gambling of church members? Where would you draw the
line?
So what do you think?
During
the first few weeks, click here
to comment or read comments
Keith Drury February 10, 2009