The cacophony of slot machines, dice rolls, and card shuffles is what usually comes to mind when people think of gambling. The more pervasive way to gamble that has become more popular over the years is with your cellphone.

The computers in our pockets provide us with 24/7 access to sites and apps that facilitate our bets for us. People can’t even watch a sports game on their phone without being inundated with ads for fantasy sports platforms. Why not combine phone addiction with gambling? What’s the worst that could happen?

Writing in The Atlantic, Christine Emba anticipates the dreadful impact:

In a sense, Americans have been training themselves for years to become eager users of gambling tech. Smartphone-app design relies on the “variable reward” method of habit formation to get people hooked—the same mechanism that casinos use to keep people playing games and pulling levers. When Instagram sends notifications about likes or worthwhile posts, people are impelled to open the app and start scrolling; when sports-betting apps send push alerts about fantastic parlays, people are coaxed into placing one more bet.

Smartphones have thus habituated people to an expectation of stimulation—and potential reward—at every moment. Timothy Fong, a UCLA psychiatry professor and a co-director of the university’s gambling-studies program, said, “You’re constantly surrounded by the ability to change your neurochemistry by a simple click. There’s this idea that we have to have excessive dopamine with every experience in our life.”

The frictionless ease of mobile sports betting takes advantage of this. It has become easy, even ordinary, to experience the excitement of gambling everywhere. It isn’t enough anymore to be anxious about the final score of the Saturday night football game—let’s up the ante and bet on the winning team!

But at what cost? Indeed, what happens when we begin to think of every scenario in our lives in terms of risk/reward and the dispassionate calculations of probability? This can turn life itself into some cosmic game, twisting relationships into scenarios we scheme and manipulate as we chase the dopamine rush of a winning bet. The easy accessibility to gambling won’t just affect us personally, for it can also change the culture around us.

Possible Preaching Angle:

As online gambling infiltrates society (and the church), there are more opportunities for temptation, people can hide their gambling addiction by not leaving their home. How many secret addicted gamblers are there in our churches?