Getting my feelings written out on this topic has proven difficult for me. It isn’t hard because I don’t believe. And it isn’t hard because I have to stretch to find a way to talk about it. It’s hard because it brings up some hard memories that broke my heart as a child and still haunt me today.
For a few years as a child, I lived in a city that is known for the glitz and glamor of its casinos. People came from all over the world to visit and to be entertained. For me, the lights and the glitter and the music are all symbolic of a façade that hid a terribly high cost of participating in what those casinos offered.
What some called risk, others called a rush. What some called opportunity, others called waste. And what some called fun, I came to see as danger.
Sometimes I cheered for certain sports teams to win so that my friends wouldn’t be hurt by their fathers. Sometimes I cheered for them because I knew there was a chance my friend would have to move because his family’s rent was riding on some random team’s success at a sporting event that night.
But the teams lost. Friends came to school with bruises or worse. Classmates moved. Parents divorced. Dads were arrested. In my view, no one ever won. And lots of people cried.
That lifestyle was completely normal for many families where I lived at the time. I’m grateful that my parents taught me to never get started with gambling. And I saw too many examples of why starting was so hard to stop.
In 1987, then-Elder Dallin H. Oaks of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles taught in a message shared at Ricks College (now BYU–Idaho) called “Gambling — Morally Wrong and Politically Unwise.”
In that meeting, Elder Oaks taught about the morally wrong practice of gambling and the politically unwise public policies that allowed gambling. He said the Savior teaches that individuals should give to one another and Satan encourages people to take from one another. Gambling is a form of taking something from another that is not earned by an individual’s personal effort. And on the other side of the equation, someone has been taken from or has been taken advantage of.
President D. Todd Christofferson, second counselor in the First Presidency, revisited this topic with his October 2026 general conference message.
“A key part of a life well-lived is contributing to the well-being of others. It is being productive in worthy endeavors. It is being and doing better without others doing worse,” he said.
Gambling doesn’t make the financial winner or loser better for having participated. Money aside, no one wins.
The late President Gordon B. Hinckley also taught about the perils of gambling.
“Gambling is to be found almost everywhere and is growing,” he said at the April 2005 general conference.
I wonder what he would say today if he could see how much bigger this industry has become.
Sports on television have become inundated with information about the odds for more than the outcomes of games. Prop bets encourage wagering money — or predicting, if you want to use the industry’s preferred term — on everything from a player’s performance to how many timeouts will be called.
The danger of starting down this road of predicting outcomes of world events that a bettor has no control over is frightening in the eternal perspective.
President Hinckley offered options for better uses of time and resources.
“There are better ways to spend one’s time. There are better pursuits to occupy one’s interest and energy. There is so much of wonderful reading available. We are not likely to ever get too much of it. There is music to be learned and enjoyed. There is just having a good time together — in dancing, in hiking, in cycling or in other ways — boys and girls together enjoying one another’s company in a wholesome way,” he said.
President Christofferson said: “Today, I am pleading with all of us to live life on a higher plane. ... If we hunger and thirst after righteousness, there are many good things we will pursue and other things that, because they are incompatible with righteousness, we will put out of our lives entirely.”
And Elder Oaks said: “If members of our Church do not oppose immoral and pernicious practices, who will? If not now, when? ... May God help us to do so.”
Delete the apps. Delete their associated accounts. The risk is more than financial. The risk is for the souls of men and women and children everywhere.
Your soul is not worth the gamble.
— Jon Ryan Jensen is editor of the Church News.
