On Sunday, as the Kansas City Chiefs battle the Philadelphia Eagles in the Super Bowl, many Americans will wager on the game for money. ESPN is reporting legal bets on the game should amount to $1.39 billion, to say nothing of the billions more that will be wagered informally (and sometimes illegally).

Utah is not one of the 38 states that now permit some form of legal sports betting. In fact, the historically majority-Latter-day Saint state has no forms of legal gambling — not so much as a state lottery.

This can largely be attributed to the deep and long-standing influence The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has in the state, where it is headquartered. Even if self-identified Latter-day Saints/Mormons are no longer the majority in Utah’s state population, their influence runs deep.

The church has had a consistent, even unequivocal policy against gambling. Its website states that “gambling is motivated by a desire to get something for nothing. This desire is spiritually destructive. It leads participants away from the Savior’s teachings of love and service and toward the selfishness of the adversary. It undermines the virtues of work and thrift and the desire to give honest effort in all we do.”

The policy then jumps quickly to the worst-case scenario, saying those who gamble waste money, sacrifice their own honor and lose the respect of friends and family. “Deceived and addicted, they often gamble with funds they should use for other purposes, such as meeting the basic needs of their families. Gamblers sometimes become so enslaved and so desperate to pay gambling debts that they turn to stealing, giving up their own good name.”

Not a lot of wiggle room there. The church is clear that gambling is wrong, and doesn’t seem to make any distinction between dilettantes who play the lottery on occasion and hard-core gamblers who lose everything to full-blown addiction.

Are views changing? You bet.

What’s interesting is that a growing number of U.S. Latter-day Saints seem to be adopting more of a live-and-let-live approach to the question. In the 2016 Next Mormons Survey, 14% of Latter-day Saint respondents put gambling in the “morally acceptable” category, with 56% saying it was “morally wrong” and 30% considering it “not a moral issue.” A majority, then, agreed with the church’s position that gambling is immoral.

The 2022–23 Next Mormons Survey, by contrast, showed 19% saying it is morally acceptable, 44% calling it morally wrong and 37% not seeing it as a moral issue.

So the share of those who believe gambling to be immoral dropped by 12 percentage points. Those points are nearly evenly distributed between those who think gambling is moral and those who don’t consider it a moral issue.

Some of the expected findings apply here. Latter-day Saints outside Utah are more accepting of gambling than those who live in the Beehive State; men are more accepting than women; and younger people are more accepting than the oldest respondents.

But the overall finding — that fewer than half of Latter-day Saint respondents now see gambling as morally wrong — surprised me. (Perhaps that’s because I personally agree with the church here in that I don’t see much good in gambling. I have personally witnessed some very sad stories of how it’s done harm. In my mind, however, there’s a world of moral difference between Grandma buying a lotto ticket and someone going full-on Al Capone.)

We did not have a survey question about whether respondents engaged in gambling or sports betting themselves, so the survey can’t shed light on Latter-day Saints’ actual behavior on this issue. But the softening of disapproval is interesting.

Missing from the pulpit

One possible reading is that this is a clear sign of secularization: As U.S. society becomes more accepting of gambling and less tied to religious leaders’ old-school condemnations of it, Latter-day Saints are affected by that, too. “Cohort replacement” — which is a nice way of pointing to the presence of younger people in surveys as older people die — is also a factor.

But there’s another possible interpretation, and it’s the exact opposite of the secularization thesis, which is that in this matter, as in many others, Latter-day Saints are playing follow the leader. By this, I mean that even though the church’s anti-gambling policy has not changed and is clearly posted on its website, it hasn’t been emphasized for a long time.

As a General Conference topic, the high points of gambling or betting being mentioned were in the 1940s and 1950s, and again in the 1990s. That corresponds well to times when gambling was very much in the news — in the midcentury period because of a string of gambling scandals, and in the 1990s and early 2000s because of the growing trend of state legalizations and riverboat casinos.

Then-church President Gordon B. Hinckley, in particular, hammered home this concern, including in a hard-hitting 2005 conference talk in the men’s priesthood session. Bemoaning the growing proliferation of various kinds of gambling, Hinckley reiterated the dangers of getting involved in it in any way, however innocuous.

In the 1990s and 2000s, gambling was mentioned 42 times in General Conference. In the 2010s and so far in the 2020s, it has come up six times. Given that reality, it’s possible that some younger members of the church don’t even know about the church’s long-standing opposition to gambling or whether something like betting on the Super Bowl would “count.”

Sorry to be a literal spoilsport, but it does: Section 38.8.17 of the church’s General Handbook specifies that its opposition “includes sports betting and government-sponsored lotteries.”

There goes your Super Bowl loophole.

(The views expressed in this opinion piece do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)