Insight on the News: Christians say no dice - Christians oppose legalized gambling

One Sunday in February, Barbara Knickelbein of Glen Burnie, Md., lingered at her United Methodist church for a meeting following the service. Knickelbein hadn't thought much about the issue at hand -- casino and riverboat gambling -- but what she heard, she didn't like.

The Maryland General Assembly is about to take up the question of legalized gambling. "We had slot machines in Glen Burnie in the 1950s," Knickelbein recalls. "We did not like the crime that came along with them." That morning, Knickelbein became an antigambling activist, one of a growing number of Americans -- tens of thousands -- whose opposition to legalized gambling springs from religious principles. As one Methodist bishop puts it, high-stakes gambling threatens "the values of human worth, fair and honest labor and the stewardship of God's precious gifts to use."

Last year, interdenominational religious groups joined with commercial interests -- restaurant owners who fear loss of clientele to casinos, for example -- to defeat legalized gambling bills in Colorado, Rhode Island and Florida. Earlier this year, similar groups -- whose members use fax machines to exchange information with each other and the Alabama-based National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling -- caused state legislators in Virginia and West Virginia to table bills supporting riverboat and casino gambling.

The fight has been comparatively easy -- given the resources of the gaming industry. Harvey's Casino Resorts and Harrah's spent $16.5 million in Florida yet lost a vote by nearly 2-to-1. At least 10 high-profile lobbyists have been hired to promote gambling in Annapolis, the capital of Maryland. And they come bearing potent lures: jobs for ailing economies and revenue for depleted budgets.

Meanwhile, antigambling activists have had to mount their attacks with slingshots. Church members in Virginia persuaded the conservative Christian Coalition to kick in half of the bus fares for them to travel to Richmond to demonstrate against a gambling bill. West Virginians helped to table a similar measure by distributing antigambling broadsides.

The most potent lure, at least for legislators, is the 20 percent tax that governments routinely levy on casinos. During the first year of gambling, for example, Missouri state and local governments divvied up more than $70 million in taxes collected from gambling and admission prices to riverboats -- not much when compared to the total Missouri sales-tax income of $9 billion, but nonetheless real cash to beleaguered legislators. Still, easy money doesn't impress the antigambling forces, who argue that legalized gambling is an undesirable -- and lazy -- way for legislators to solve fiscal problems.

Indeed, there is conflicting evidence about gambling's profitability. In Tunica County, Miss., one of the poorest counties in the nation, unemployment fell from 30 to 5 five percent after nine riverboat casinos began operating on the Mississippi, according to Ramsey Poston, editor of the Washington-based CASINEWS, the gaming industry's newsletter. But two riverboats in New Orleans closed this summer when they failed to show a profit after several months of operation, and a land-based casino there reported earnings only one-third of what was expected.

The correlation between crime and gambling also is unclear. Gambling opponents point to the high crime rate in Atlantic City, N.J.; proponents point to the example of East St. Louis, Ill., where the crime rate fell precipitously after gambling was legalized.

Nonetheless, there is persuasive evidence that people suffer when casinos and riverboats open for business. The Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey Inc., which operates a nationwide hot line for problem gamblers, reports that calls were up 21 percent in 1994 after legalized gambling went into gear in Missouri, Mississippi and Louisiana. "We don't need to read a newspaper to know where it's been legalized," says council spokesman Kevin O'Neill, who says the biggest change during the last two years has been in the number of women calling -- from 11 percent five years ago to 25 percent and climbing in 1994.

According to O'Neill, the average annual income of a hot-line caller in 1994 was $40,000 (a 14 percent decrease from the previous year) while the average gambling debt rose nearly 10 percent to $25,000 -- a debt, of course, that doesn't include mortgage or car loans. The average family of the hot-line user includes three children under age 20.

It's evidence such as this that makes gambling opponents such as Maryland's Knickelbein wary of compromise. "Some people say, 'Wouldn't it be okay to put a casino in some remote, rural part of the state?'" states Knickelbein, who sports a "No Casinos" T-shirt. "It would not be Christian to say we don't want it here, but we wouldn't mind it in someone else's backyard. We don't want it anywhere."