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Addiction
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6 min read

An irresponsible gamble

Out-of-date law and human nature mean sports betting is more than harmless fun – it ruins lives, argues Sam Tomlin.

Sam Tomlin is a Salvation Army officer, leading a local church in Liverpool where he lives with his wife and children.

The edge of a football pitch showing an advertising hoarding with a betting brand name on it.
Lars Schmidt, via Wikimedia Commons.

On 21st April 2021 husband and father of two young children Luke Ashton took his own life. Suicide is the biggest cause of death for men under 50 in the UK, but this suicide had a particular source. As recounted by his widow and now anti-gambling campaigner Annie, Luke developed a gambling disorder linked to his support of Leicester City and football gambling more generally. Getting furloughed in the pandemic exacerbated the problem and he succumbed to aggressive advertising on his smart phone, losing more and more money to the point of despair and no return. 

I am not surprised to hear of stories like Luke’s. That’s because I am a Salvation Army officer. Some may view the pledge to give up all forms of gambling when you join its ranks as archaic and over-the-top, but this insistence by the Salvation Army, which was founded in the 1800’s, was a response to the devastation to lives addiction can cause. Far from being a thing of the past, gambling continues to wreak havoc, especially in poor communities like the one I live and serve in today. I have had personal items stolen and pawned to fund gambling addictions and have heard of people losing thousands of pounds in a few hours.  

Recently our church was part of a local campaign to stop an iconic building from being turned into a cashino, something which we and others in our community knew could have a devastating impact. Thankfully the company withdrew the application, probably because of local opposition, but areas of high socio-economic deprivation like ours are always under such threat. 

If you force young people to endorse addictive products, don’t be surprised if they use them.

I have friends who gamble on sport and tell me it is just harmless fun. It makes the experience more exciting when you have money on it, they say, something sports betting companies focus on in their advertising. While not every gambler is a problem gambler (Public Health England estimates there are 2.2 million who either are problem gamblers or are at risk of addiction), I am not convinced that it is harmless fun for two main reasons. 

Firstly, the risk of ‘harmless’ gambling turning into problem gambling is not adequately managed by UK legislation. The 2005 Gambling Act refers more to gambling by post than online gambling and was passed at a time before smart phones. This legislation, intended to boost the economy through liberalising gambling laws, has allowed sports gambling to spiral out of control; 40% of Premier League clubs are sponsored by a betting company with many more in lower divisions. Concerns have been raised about transparency on behalf of these betting companies and it seems clear that these companies exploit the Premier League’s global profile to reach potential customers in countries like China where gambling advertising is banned. Aston Villa recently responded to a supporter backlash against a new sponsorship deal but made it clear that money talks: for clubs outside the top six (who can attract significantly greater deals), betting firms offer ‘twice as much financially as non-gambling companies.’ 

My team, Bristol City, had a gambling sponsor for many years until this season – although ironically children’s shirts had the sponsor changed in a tacit acknowledgement of potential harm. Hypocrisy in football betting runs much deeper though. Ivan Toney the Brentford striker currently faces a lengthy ban for a breach of the FA’s betting rules, but as The Big Step campaign (led by people harmed by gambling) pointed out – with various pictures of Toney receiving awards and shirts with gambling sponsors on them - ‘If you force young people to endorse addictive products, don’t be surprised if they use them.’ 

It is almost impossible to watch a match on TV without being bombarded with free bet offers and the latest deals with former players enticing fans to gamble their money with a few simple clicks on their phones. One recent study questions whether it is possible to gamble responsibly in an age of smart phones, and outlines significant potential harm even for ‘low and moderate risk gamblers — including relationship problems, being distracted, lost opportunities across work and personal life, secretive behaviours, and a compulsion to open and continually re-engage with the app.’ 

A review of the Gambling Act is currently being carried out, but frustration is growing as publication is delayed. While a blanket prohibition on gambling would neither be practical or desirable, campaigners hope that steps will be taken to restrict gambling advertising in much the same way that advertising for smoking has been banned. The gambling industry cite the contribution gambling brings to the economy, but a report by the Social Market Foundation suggested that tighter regulation could actually boost the economy and in 2016 it was estimated that gambling addiction cost the economy £1.2bn a year. For a society built on an understanding of ‘freedom,’ however, as defined by challenging anything that might hinder our individual wills, gambling may constitute the example par excellence of the confluence of social and economic liberalism. Any significant change to legislation will be hard-won. 

The second reason is that gambling promises more than it can ever actually deliver. This is why it so often ends in harmful addiction – it can never truly satisfy what are ultimately spiritual needs, so it continues to draw you further and further in until you are no longer in control but it controls you. 

There are perhaps three main reasons people gamble: the desire to win money, the social aspect and the thrill or excitement. There is no doubt that gambling offers the possibility of fulfilment, to some degree, for all these things: occasionally people win large sums of money, it can make sport more exciting and help make the social experience more fun. 

We are indeed made for community and the communal enjoyment of sport.

As Christians see it, however, gambling offers an unreliable and ultimately unsatisfying route to fulfilling these desires. The Bible warns us about the love of money and encourages honest work as opposed to chance for earning what we need to live It also points to the importance of charity and justice for those who do not have enough. We are made for community and the communal enjoyment of sport is a gift from God (as I have written about in the past). It is perfectly possible, however, to enjoy sport without gambling – really supporting and following a team or player comes with enough ups and downs to produce a wide range of emotions; I have cried, bitten my nails, hidden my head in my hands and hugged random strangers often during one single game. It could be argued that even non-problem gambling contributes to fund an industry that demonstrably preys on vulnerable people, failing the command to love our neighbour. 

We are also created to experience thrill and excitement beyond the mundane aspects of everyday life, but the greatest drama according to the Christian faith is found in being caught up in God’s redemption of the world, ‘reconciling all things to himself’ as we read in the New Testament. As many Christians will testify – even the most exciting Hollywood film is a pale imitation of the excitement and drama of giving up your life to follow the way of Jesus, and this is certainly true of the fleeting and temporary thrills experienced through gambling. 

Unlike some religions which want to supress desire, the Christian faith affirms desire as a good thing. The question is, what our desire is aimed at. Augustine once said that our hearts are restless until they find rest in God. Created things or activities like sex, possessions, money or experiences are good when enjoyed in the right context, but when – like with gambling - they promise more than they can deliver, more often than not it ends in dissatisfaction and potentially even disaster as Luke Ashton’s story tragically demonstrates.  

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6 min read

How to survive a culture war

Blaise Pascal shows us what really underlies our contemporary battles.

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Two goats lock horns.
Maxime Gilbert on Unsplash.

We often say these days that we are more polarised as a society than ever before. But we're wrong. Maybe the USA is experiencing a particularly sharp divide right now, but they have had their own, much more violent troubles in the past. And in Europe, and especially in Britain, we know a fair bit about culture wars that were literally that – wars.  

In the 17th century, we English had our own civil war where we literally killed each other over religion and politics. We even killed a king. The French did something similar and even more vicious just over 100 years later. That is real polarisation. However spiteful Twitter/X arguments may get, I don't think Charles III or even Kier Starmer is quaking in their beds expecting to be put on trial for treason.  

So maybe our history has something to teach us about how we navigate culture wars.  

The literary critic Terry Eagleton once wrote of our age:  

“the world is accordingly divided between those who believe too much and those who believe too little. While some lack all conviction, others are full of passionate intensity.” 

 We tend to think our contemporary divide between left and right, progressives and conservatives is something new. But we can find echoes of this in previous times.  

A case in point was the mid-17th century – the time of many other upheavals in Europe. Part of the febrile atmosphere of the time saw fierce arguments between rationalists and sceptics.  

There were at the time, two broad strands of thinking about the human condition. On the one had there were the ‘Dogmatists’ who were sure that they knew everything through use of reason or the application of philosophical or scientific method (like René Descartes). On the other hand, there were the ‘Sceptics’ who thought everything was random, or custom, and there is no final Truth to be found (like a figure from the century before – Michel de Montaigne). 

Of course, our own time has its fair share of people with an overwhelming confidence in the power of human knowledge, and the physical sciences in particular, to unlock the secrets of life, the universe and everything. The ‘new atheist’ project of Richard Dawkins and friends was hugely confident in reason and its capacity to tell us all we need to know, dispatching religion to the dustbin of history and instead placing an unshakable faith in the empirical methods of science. It had - and has - definite similarities with this picture of human knowledge.  

Yet on the other hand we also have, in the progressive postmodern project, those who reject any kind of underlying rationality or sacred order either above us or beneath us. For them, there is no underlying Truth to be discovered, and they delight in revealing the instability and illusory nature of any claim to truth. It sounds very much like the culture wars of our time. 

One enigmatic 17th century figure charted a way through this dilemma - Blaise Pascal. When he looked at his century’s culture war, he thought both sides had a point. There is, he observed… 

…open war between men in which everyone is obliged to take sides, either with the dogmatists or with the sceptics, because anyone who imagines he can stay neutral is a sceptic par excellence…. Who will unravel such a tangle? This is certainly beyond dogmatism and scepticism, beyond all human philosophy. Humanity transcends humanity. Let us then concede to the sceptics what they have so often proclaimed that truth lies beyond our scope and is an unattainable quarry, that it is no earthly denizen, but at home in heaven lying in the lap of God, to be known only insofar as it pleases him to reveal it. 

So far, he says, the sceptics, like Montaigne, are right. Truth is beyond our grasp, it does not reside here on earth, openly obvious and ready to be found. If it exists, it exists in some world above us, beyond our reach. How do we even know if we are asleep or awake, given that when we dream, we are as convinced that we are awake as we are when we are truly awake?  

And so, modern progressives, looking to dismantle the assumed results of previous understanding, due to its inherent colonial, patriarchal or abusive past, delight in showing how random and arbitrary is so much of what we take for granted from the past. And, Pascal would add, they have a point. Many of our legal, political and cultural assumptions are purely cultural and arbitrary, and sometimes simply serve to the advantage of the rich and powerful rather than the poor and marginalised. 

Yet on the other side, the ‘dogmatists’, like Descartes, have their strong point, which is that we cannot doubt natural principles. The acids of deconstruction can only take you so far. The most sceptical philosopher still puts the kettle on assuming that it will boil to make a cup of tea. She gets up in the morning assuming that the sun will rise and set again at the end of the day. Despite the corrosive effects of scepticism, Pascal wrote,  

“I maintain that a perfectly genuine sceptic has never existed. Nature backs up helpless reason and stops it going so wildly astray.”  

Despite all our doubt, we still live in a world with order and predictability. Scepticism keeps bumping up against reality.   

So, modern conservatives point to a deeper ‘givenness’ to things, an order within the natural world that we did not create, and yet, mysteriously, seems to be prearranged before we got here. Scientific exploration does make sense. There is a regularity to nature that we can, indeed have to, depend on. Sexual differences exist and can’t be ignored. We are not entirely free to override the natural order of things - there is a deeper rhythm to nature and its capacity for renewal that we only mess with at our peril, as climate change has taught us. As a result, the age-old battle between rationalists and sceptics, progressives and conservatives, will never find resolution, as the arguments flow back and forth.  

Christian faith includes both progressive and conservative impulses. Christians are aware of the brokenness of the world and therefore long to see it changed. The progressive impatience with the way things are, and the yearning for a better world has its roots in Christian faith.  

Yet at the same time, Christianity discerns a divinely created order to the world, a rhythm to the natural world, that cannot be broken and needs to be respected. Therefore, an inherent conservatism is part of Christian faith as well. In other words, the Christian story can explain both and offer a bigger picture than either.  

For Pascal, Christianity offers a diagnosis for this mystery of the human condition, the complex mix of grandeur and misery, infinity and nothing, sceptic and rationalist, in the simple, yet endlessly generative idea that we humans are gloriously created, deeply fallen and yet offered redemption through Jesus Christ. Our sadness is heroic and tragic. In Pascal’s suggestive image, it is “the wretchedness of a great Lord, the wretchedness of a dispossessed king.” 

“We show our greatness,” says Pascal, “not by being at one extreme, but by touching both at once and occupying all the space in between.” For him, the very existence of such culture wars points to the truth of the Christian diagnosis of the human condition. 

Pascal offers us a way between the Scylla of Progressivism and the Charybdis of Conservatism – or perhaps better, to embrace the best of both. Culture wars are tricky to navigate. Yet they might find resolution if we allow them to point us to a deeper reality - our strange mixture of greatness and sadness. And not losing sight of either side of this enduring truth.  

 

Graham Tomlin is the author of Blaise Pascal: The Man Who Made the Modern World  (Hodder) £25.  

Watch Graham explain why he is fascinated by Pascal.

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