At General Conference, President D. Todd Christofferson revived an old Latter-day Saint warning for a new generation carrying a casino in its pocket.
There was nothing complicated about the message.
“We are against it.”
With those words during the Saturday morning session of the 196th Semiannual General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, President D. Todd Christofferson, Second Counselor in the First Presidency, addressed a practice that has undergone a remarkable transformation in American life.
Gambling once required a trip to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, a racetrack or perhaps a convenience store lottery counter. Today the casino rides around in your pocket.
Sportsbooks advertise during games. Smartphones offer online casino games around the clock. Prediction markets increasingly invite people to wager on everything from elections to current events. A generation that might never walk through the doors of a casino can place a bet in seconds.
President Christofferson’s warning could hardly have been better timed.
“Gambling is morally wrong,” he taught. It can become consuming and compulsive, stealing time from education, relationships and careers. More fundamentally, he said, gambling is built around the desire to obtain something for nothing. And therein lies a principle much larger than gambling itself.
Something for Nothing
The Church’s position did not begin this weekend. The Church’s current General Handbook states unequivocally that it “opposes gambling in any form, including government-sponsored lotteries.”
That teaching stretches back generations. President Gordon B. Hinckley devoted a General Conference address to gambling in 2005. He quoted earlier Church presidents going back more than a century and observed that gambling cultivates “the taste of getting something for nothing.”
President Spencer W. Kimball likewise warned about seeking “something without effort.” President Joseph F. Smith condemned gambling, games of chance and lotteries in 1908. President Heber J. Grant described the Church as “unalterably opposed to gambling in any form whatever.”
President Christofferson therefore was not announcing a new prohibition. He was applying an old principle to a technological environment that has made violating it easier than previous generations could have imagined.
The warning is especially significant because gambling has ceased to occupy the cultural margins. It has become an enormous industry.
The American Gaming Association reports that legal commercial gambling in the United States generated a record $78.7 billion in revenue during 2025. Sports betting alone generated nearly $17 billion, increasing more than 22 percent in a single year, while legal online casino gambling exceeded $10 billion.
Those numbers represent something worth remembering whenever gambling is marketed as entertainment: The industry’s revenue ultimately comes from its customers’ losses.
And the legal market is only part of the picture. American Gaming Association research estimates that Americans wager approximately $673.6 billion each year through illegal and unregulated gambling operations.
A Church That Asks Its Members to Live Differently
President Christofferson’s message also fits within a much broader pattern in Latter-day Saint life. The restored gospel asks something of its adherents.
Members are taught to abstain from alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea and harmful drugs through the Word of Wisdom. They are taught chastity before marriage and fidelity within it. They fast. They donate fast offerings to help the poor. They pay tithing. They are encouraged to obtain education, work diligently, avoid unnecessary debt, save for the future, strengthen their families and serve their communities.
None of those practices guarantees prosperity, perfect health or happiness. Latter-day Saints experience cancer, unemployment, divorce, depression, bankruptcy, addiction and tragedy just as human beings everywhere do.
But taken together, these teachings establish a remarkably consistent philosophy: Exercise self-control today in order to obtain something better tomorrow.
That principle is almost the exact opposite of the impulse underlying gambling. The gambler is tempted by immediacy: risk something now in hope of receiving much more without producing corresponding value.
The gospel repeatedly teaches delayed gratification: work, save, learn, sacrifice, give, serve and build.
The Word of Wisdom Is an Interesting Case Study
The health consequences provide perhaps the clearest measurable example.
The Word of Wisdom was recorded by Joseph Smith in 1833, long before modern medicine understood many of the consequences of tobacco and excessive alcohol consumption. Today faithful Latter-day Saints abstain from both.
A peer-reviewed study of 9,815 religiously active California Latter-day Saints followed from 1980 through 2004 found substantially reduced mortality among those practicing the healthy lifestyle associated with their faith. Researchers specifically identified abstention from tobacco and alcohol, education, marriage, church attendance and other lifestyle characteristics as important factors.
Among the particularly healthy subgroup studied, life expectancy from age 25 reached approximately 84 years for men and 86 for women.
Importantly, the researchers found similar advantages among people of other religions who practiced comparable healthy behaviors.
The scientific evidence does not demonstrate that merely being listed on Church membership records somehow makes a person healthier. Rather, it supports something much more interesting: principles taught by the Church can produce measurable benefits when people actually live them. The same logic applies beyond physical health.
Tithing Teaches the Opposite Lesson From Gambling
Consider tithing. A faithful Latter-day Saint learns to take income that could immediately be spent and voluntarily dedicate one-tenth to God.
Whatever one’s religious beliefs about tithing, the behavioral lesson is unmistakable. It requires planning. It requires living on less than one receives. It requires resisting immediate consumption. It requires placing a principle ahead of an impulse.
Fast offerings add another dimension. Members abstain from food and drink while fasting and are encouraged to donate generously for the relief of those in need.
Again, the lesson is not What can I get? It is What can I give?
President Hinckley made precisely this contrast when discussing gambling in General Conference in 2005. After describing lotteries and casinos, he expressed gratitude that the Lord had instead given the Church the law of tithing.
One system depends upon multitudes losing so that a few may gain. The other asks everyone to contribute so that God’s work can move forward and those in need can receive help.
Gambling Reverses the Equation
President Christofferson made an especially perceptive observation during this weekend’s conference. Gambling, he explained, is structurally dependent upon one person’s gain coming at another’s expense.
“It’s hard to reconcile that with the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves,” he said.
That gets beneath arguments about whether someone can “afford” to put $20 on a football game. The concern is not merely whether an individual gambler goes broke. It is about what kind of instincts we cultivate.
Work creates. Investment can create. Education develops human capacity. Entrepreneurship produces goods and services. Saving provides capital. Charitable giving helps another person.
Gambling produces no comparable good. Money simply changes hands according to an uncertain outcome, with the organizer taking enough from the transaction to ensure that the system remains profitable.
As President Christofferson put it: “Work leads to prosperous, just, and equitable societies. Gambling, even for fun, leads in the opposite direction.”
The Smartphone Changed Everything
There is another reason this warning deserves attention in 2026. Friction once protected people. A person who wanted to gamble might have needed to drive somewhere, enter a casino, visit a bookmaker or buy a lottery ticket. Every additional step provided another opportunity to reconsider.
Technology has eliminated much of that friction. A sporting event can now become a continuous sequence of betting opportunities. Instead of simply wagering on which team wins, users can be invited to wager throughout the contest on individual performances and events.
The casino never closes because the casino is the telephone. And that telephone accompanies its owner to work, school, the bedroom and the family dinner table.
President Christofferson specifically pointed to smartphones as one reason gambling has become so pervasive, particularly among young adults and youth. That makes the Church’s old-fashioned counsel look increasingly contemporary. Sometimes a boundary is liberating. Don’t start.
An Older Wisdom for a New Problem
There is a tendency in modern society to regard religious commandments primarily as restrictions.
Don’t drink. Don’t smoke. Don’t gamble.
Pay tithing. Fast. Keep the Sabbath. Remain sexually faithful. Live within your means.
Viewed separately, they can look like a collection of things one is denied. Viewed across a lifetime, however, another pattern becomes visible. They are habits of discipline.
A person who learns repeatedly to tell himself, I could do this, but I choose not to, develops something increasingly scarce in a world engineered around instant gratification: self-mastery.
That does not mean every faithful Latter-day Saint will be wealthy, healthy, highly educated or perpetually happy. Nor does it mean people outside the Church cannot possess these qualities in abundance.
It means that a religious culture emphasizing education, work, family, service, charitable giving, avoidance of addictive substances and resistance to gambling provides its members with a framework that can encourage human flourishing. The fruits depend upon how faithfully the principles are practiced.
“O Be Wise”
President Christofferson concluded his conference message with four words from the Book of Mormon prophet Jacob: “O be wise; what can I say more?”
Perhaps that is exactly the right conclusion. A society surrounded by advertisements promising instant riches might rediscover the virtue of earning. A culture drowning in debt might rediscover thrift. A generation accustomed to instant gratification might rediscover patience.
And people carrying casinos in their pockets might occasionally benefit from hearing a religious leader say something society increasingly hesitates to say: Some things that are legal, popular and entertaining still aren’t good for us.
For Latter-day Saints, there should be little ambiguity about gambling. There wasn’t ambiguity in 1908. There wasn’t ambiguity when President Hinckley addressed it in 2005.
And after President D. Todd Christofferson stood before the worldwide Church in October 2026, there shouldn’t be ambiguity today. “We are against it.”
Not because disciples of Jesus Christ should spend their lives looking for less. But because they have been invited to live for something more.
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