With the Superbowl coming up this weekend, I think it’s time to pose this gripping moral question: is gambling sinful?

I ask this partly because I feel confident that someone out there will pull from the shelf one of those delightful old manuals of morality that the Church doesn’t seem to publish anymore, and give us a concrete answer. I love those old manuals (even while considering them a tad bit less authoritative than, say, Scripture), so that’s always a treat.

But the question is at least mildly interesting. Evangelicals (and the conservative Bible-thumping Protestant groups of a younger America, from which present-day Evangelicals draw their inspiration) tend to condemn gambling in a fairly unequivocal, across-the-board sort of way. I remember getting in debates back in grade school about whether card-playing was permissible in any form, and a childhood friend of mine used to play gambling-free poker with her siblings. (And when her parents said gambling-free, they meant it: the kids would deal the cards, and then see who got the best hand. Oh, it was table-thumping fun, I can tell you.)

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