Wolfe (left) and acting associate dean David Quigley at the two-day conference. Photograph: Frank Curran

From the turn of the 20th century until the middle 1960s, all U.S. states prohibited gambling, with the famous exception of Nevada. Today, of course, gambling is everywhere—in all states save Utah and Hawaii. Forty-two states run their own lotteries, which in 2006 sold $52 billion worth of tickets; most states host Indian-run casinos or bingo halls; and 13 states allow, and tax, commercial casinos, with Massachusetts poised to become the 14th if a proposal by Governor Deval Patrick is approved by the state legislature.

This story of ascendant gambling was told repeatedly, often in mildly astonished tones, by presenters at a conference held at Boston College on October 25–26. As one speaker summed up: “We’ve become essentially a gambling nation.” And yet, said Alan Wolfe, a Boston College political science professor and convener of the conference, “It’s amazing how little attention has been paid . . . especially in the academic world” to the rise of gambling.

The conference, an attempt to pay more attention, was put on by the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, which brought in speakers from fields as diverse as theology and economics, political science and psychiatry to ponder how such a sweeping change could have occurred with so little public fuss, why Americans gamble to begin with, and what all this says about the country’s political and moral health. The event attracted, among others, BC students and faculty, English and American film crews making documentaries about gambling, former state attorney general L. Scott Harshbarger, and officials from the Massachusetts Family Institute, a religious conservative lobbying group that opposes casino gambling, and the Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling, which offers services to problem gamblers.

On the conference’s first panel Michael Nelson, a political scientist from Rhodes College, presented a paper that traced the gambling boom to the tax revolts of the 1970s and 1980s. “Politicians who wanted to raise money to create new programs looked on raising taxes as . . . politically dangerous,” Nelson said. Lotteries would be safer, they correctly assumed. Most lottery states adopted their lotteries only after successful referenda. (Boston College political science professor R. Shep Melnick, in his discussion of Nelson’s paper, called lotteries not only a regressive tax but one “that people would line up to pay, voluntarily.”) As Nelson noted, once a few states had lotteries, “diffusion” began. With citizens of lottery-free states crossing state lines to place bets, their state officials concluded, in Nelson’s paraphrase, that adopting their own lottery—or, later, inviting in casinos—”[may not be] a good thing, but we’ve got to find a way to keep our money within our state.” Charles Clotfelter, a Duke University economics professor, added that “good causes,” notably education, slated to be funded by lottery proceeds, were a key selling point for state officials and referendum voters, though once a lottery was up and running, such programs were rarely invoked to sell the lottery to players.

Religion also played a role, albeit indirectly, in the spread of lotteries and casinos, according to Boston College’s Wolfe and William Stuntz of Harvard Law School. Stuntz, an evangelical Protestant, said his coreligionists have been less active on gambling than on other “culture war” issues, attributing the difference to their alliance, on abortion and gay rights, with conservative Roman Catholics, whose greater tolerance of gambling seems to have rubbed off. Wolfe noted that gambling and evangelical religion “compete for the same audience,” recounting conversations in which evangelical ministers had said, in effect, “The people I want to bring the Good News to might be tempted to gamble. Should I hit them over the head [with anti-gambling arguments] and risk losing them?”

Wolfe’s Boston College colleague, Richard McGowan, SJ, associate professor of operations, information, and strategic management in the Carroll School, portrayed another ethical balancing act in his study of public attitudes toward gambling and tobacco. McGowan described an “ethic of tolerance” that argues people should be left alone unless their activities harm others, and an “ethic of sacrifice,” which holds that people may have to give up rights for the common good. Most Americans have concluded that gambling, with its contribution to the public coffers, meets both ethical tests, while tobacco, with its associated health care costs and the effects of secondhand smoke, meets neither—a reversal of former attitudes toward both gambling and smoking, McGowan said.

Other conference speakers narrowed their focus to the individual gambler. The economist Rachel Croson, of the University of Texas at Dallas, for instance, took on the question of why anyone would gamble, given that bets, whether on the lottery or at the gaming table, have a “negative expected value.” Croson answered with a catalogue of fallacies that, according to both field and laboratory research, people fall prey to while gambling, all of which cause them greatly to underestimate the odds against them. She cited, among others, the fallacy of “history dependence,” whereby lottery players steer clear of a number that has recently won, even though the odds of its coming up are the same regardless of whether it came up yesterday, or never. History dependence is symptomatic of gamblers’ misplaced belief that they “can control random outcomes,” Croson said.

Croson also pointed to a physiological component of the urge to gamble: Dopamine levels rise during gambling—more so with a win than a loss, but even before a bet’s outcome is known, levels of the pleasure-promoting neurotransmitter begin to shoot up. In his paper “A Neuropsychiatric Perspective on Gambling and Morality,” panelist Marc Potenza, a Yale psychiatry professor, reported that compulsive gamblers, during “simulated gambling” in the research lab, show distinctive brain scan patterns and neurotransmitter levels. The prevalence of depression in problem gamblers, he said, could mean that a single inherited feature contributes to both pathologies.

Gambling and control, a theme first raised by Croson, was taken up again but with a very different slant in presentations by Kathryn Tanner, a University of Chicago theologian, and T.J. Jackson Lears, a historian from Rutgers. In a society such as America’s, where risk is spread unevenly and only the wealthy can hedge their bets, gambling gives individuals of lesser means “at least the illusion of being in control of [their] fate,” Tanner said. While the odds may be long, she said, the lottery or the slots are a rare source of hope for a new beginning for the poor and the unemployed.

Lears went further. In what was probably the conference’s boldest and most controversial paper, he argued that gambling was central to an alternative culture in America, “the culture of chance,” which he contrasted favorably with the dominant “managerial culture of control.” While admitting that he finds casinos depressing, he nevertheless likened contemporary gambling to the ancient practice of sortilege—“casting lots . . . to determine the will of God.” In a sly hint that clinicians who pathologize gambling are indulging their own class prejudice, he pointed out that day trading and currency speculation “remain untainted by the language of pathology.” Lears also suggested that for at least some players, gambling, with its near-inevitable losses, may be quasi-religious, an unrecognized form of renunciation.

The conference devoted large blocks of time to dialogue between invited speakers and the audience. One audience member, John Crowley-Buck, a Boston College master’s candidate in theology, wondered aloud about the moral import of findings on the brain physiology of compulsive gamblers. “Genes can predispose but not predetermine,” Yale’s Marc Potenza answered. “People do make choices about the behaviors they engage in.”

Ex–attorney general Harshbarger, a frequent presence at the open mike, called for fairer, more consumer-friendly gambling—that is, if Americans insist on allowing gambling in the first place. In response, Duke’s Charles Clotfelter suggested that state lotteries might keep less of the take and plow the difference into bigger payouts. Rachel Croson, for her part, envisioned “warning labels on casinos”—signs that would specify the odds for slot machines and other games. “You could de-bias some of the biases,” she said, “and that doesn’t go so far as to say we should outlaw gambling.”

The conference papers will be collected in a book tentatively titled Gambling and the American Moral Landscape, to be published in 2009. In addition to the presentations described above, there will be chapters on “The Memory of Sin” by William Galston of the Brookings Institution, “The Morality of Indian Gaming: Negotiating a Different Terrain” by Kathryn R.L. Rand and Steven Light of the University of North Dakota, and “Gambling with the Family?” by John P. Hoffman of Brigham Young University. In the meantime, audio and video recordings of the proceedings will be available at the Boisi Center’s website.

David Reich is a writer based in the Boston area.

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