To understand President D. Todd Christofferson’s vehement condemnation of gambling in his recent general conference address, it is helpful to situate gambling within broader patterns of addictive behavior, something I call “vice architecture.”
The following questions can help determine whether something fits the definition of vice architecture:
- Does it produce immediate gratification or excitement, often leading to a cycle of repeated use or dependence?
- Does it entice us to subordinate long-term interests to immediate gratification or excitement?
- Does it create a cycle of anticipation, reward, and repetition?
- Does it consume resources—money, time, attention, health, or relationships—with an associated opportunity cost?
- Does it impose costs on spouses, families, communities, or others?
- Does it erode personal autonomy—creating a growing dependence on the appetite?
This architecture applies to much more than gambling. The list is a ready-made template for pornography and other illicit sexual behavior, as well as drug and alcohol intoxication. From brain chemistry to consequences, vices can leave a destructive wake that harms individuals and communities. On illicit sex, scholars Will and Ariel Durant wrote:
A youth boiling with hormones will wonder why he should not give full freedom to his sexual desires; and if he is unchecked by custom, morals, or laws, he may ruin his life before he matures sufficiently to understand that sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group.
Without much of a stretch, “sex” in the quotation could be replaced by “gambling.” Unlike sex, however, there is no appropriate context in which gambling becomes soul-enhancing.
Dopamine
I have had several bone-breaking mountain bike crashes. As a result, I am occasionally asked, “Why do you keep doing it?” I tell them I can answer in one word: dopamine. The biking-induced chemical surge (which involves more than dopamine) is something I relentlessly seek. After a technical, aerobic ride, I experience a buzz from the brain’s chemical response that lasts about four hours. Some of the chemicals involved may be familiar:
- Dopamine
- Endogenous opioids
- Endocannabinoids
- Norepinephrine
- Serotonin
Perhaps opioids and endocannabinoids caught your attention. The sequence surrounding a normal, healthy activity such as mountain biking could be described this way:
effort → achievement → arousal → reward → recovery
A drug can produce a different sequence. Drugs like THC, cocaine, and heroin can disrupt the brain’s and body’s natural systems and push the buzz into overdrive. The sequence goes like this:
chemical → receptor/system → unusually powerful signal → repeated exposure
Brain chemistry is also relevant to gambling. Vices like gambling essentially hijack or circumvent natural biological and social processes that ordinarily contribute to personal and social well-being, redirecting them toward destructive ends.
Consider the cycle pornography can exploit:
cue → arousal → novelty → reward → new cue → arousal → novelty → reward → repetition
What happens to a motivational system when an environment supplies unusually intense, novel, immediately available stimuli at a frequency far beyond the conditions under which that system normally operates? Scarce resources can be consumed, resulting in a heavy opportunity cost burden, while consequences can be imposed on spouses, children, employers, communities, and institutions. Self-command can erode, and the individual may become dependent.
Gambling in a Vice Architecture Context
Gambling introduces the following causal chain:
stake → uncertainty → anticipation → outcome → reward/loss → renewed anticipation
The associated brain chemistry begins with the transition from stake to uncertainty. Three chemicals are relevant to this process: dopamine, noradrenaline, and cortisol. From uncertainty to anticipation, dopamine becomes important. Dopaminergic neurons can become active in anticipation of a potential reward. As the brain learns that particular cues predict gambling outcomes, the cue itself can acquire motivational significance. Noradrenaline also increases alertness and attention. This may be subjectively experienced as something like “Come on, come on…”
This transition produces an emotional and physiological arousal response. The neural processes involving dopamine effectively signal, “This matters—pay attention, learn from it, and pursue it.” In gambling, this is usually experienced as a sense of “Come on, come on!”—with each gambler filling in the desired outcome.
After anticipation comes either a win or a loss. If you win, the result elicits emotional arousal, and the brain compares the outcome with its prediction. If the win is substantially better than expected, dopaminergic neurons increase their firing, producing a phasic dopamine signal.
The win also engages other neurotransmitter systems, including the endogenous opioid system, which contributes to the pleasurable experience of reward. The experience can also involve physiological responses, including increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure, and heightened arousal, with adrenaline and noradrenaline playing a role.
A loss can produce a temporary decrease in dopamine signaling, even as the urge to “try again” persists, leading to what can be described as “I can get it back”—consciously seeking to recover the money and unconsciously seeking another dopamine surge.
The Spiritual Consequence
The chemical and physiological consequences of gambling may pale in comparison with the spiritual consequences. All vices have this in common: beyond the personal and societal damage they cause, they bring spiritual harm that may go unnoticed, partly because spiritual experience—and its loss—cannot easily be measured scientifically. We do know, however, that a loss of the Spirit seems to set off a cascade of effects. Mosiah 2:36–7 and Alma 12:10–11 describe what happens:
When gambling becomes compulsive, it can consume time, money, and attention that ought to be directed elsewhere.
In 2 Nephi 2, Lehi distinguishes between things that act and things that are acted upon. The element that prompts action is enticement. After being enticed, we can choose how we act or simply allow ourselves to be acted upon, “[f]or every man receiveth wages of him whom he listeth to obey.” Vice architecture pushes the gambler toward becoming a thing to be acted upon.
If one leans toward obeying the wrong spirit, choice remains, but its significance diminishes. It would be like moving my pawn after my king has been checkmated. Can I do it? Yes. Is there any value in it? No.
Gambling Condemnation from the Restoration Onward
Prophets of the Restoration have long condemned the spiritual dangers of gambling.
Joseph Smith associated gambling with Sabbath breaking and other disorderly practices in Missouri. Brigham Young called for the suppression of “grogshops, gambling houses, and all other disorderly houses or proceedings.”
By the beginning of the 20th century, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ objection to gambling had become more explicitly economic and moral. President Joseph F. Smith taught that “the desire to get something of value for little or nothing is pernicious,” and he warned that anything strengthening that desire aided the gambling spirit. He gave an especially simple example: “Risking a dime in the hope of winning a dollar in any game of chance is a species of gambling.”
President Heber J. Grant likewise described the Church as unalterably opposed to gambling in any form, including games of chance and occupations or businesses that took money from someone without giving something of value in return.
President Spencer W. Kimball said, “From the beginning we have been advised against gambling of every sort. The deterioration and damage comes to the person, whether he wins or loses, to get something for nothing, something without effort, something without paying the full price.”
In 1972, Dallin H. Oaks, then president of Brigham Young University, published a detailed treatment of gambling. President Oaks warned that the gambling spirit could characterize some highly speculative investments in stocks and commodities. He also drew on President Joseph F. Smith’s observation that “the spirit in which we do things decides very largely whether we are gambling or are entering into legitimate business enterprises.”
In 1987, Elder Dallin H. Oaks returned to the subject in a major address at Ricks College. He emphasized several harms of gambling: it corrupts participants; it weakens the values of work, industry, thrift, and service; it encourages greed and covetousness; and it takes from another without creating corresponding value.
When gambling becomes compulsive, it can consume time, money, and attention that ought to be directed elsewhere. The harm extends beyond whether someone wins or loses money.
Gambling is not merely an activity involving risk. It can deform one’s relationship to work, wealth, other people, and self-control. Most importantly, it can deaden communion with the Holy Spirit.
President Gordon B. Hinckley returned to the subject in general conference in 2005, simply reaffirming: “We are against it.” He also emphasized the destructive potential of compulsive gambling.
Latter-day Saint teaching has never treated risk itself as the decisive moral category. It has been concerned with what the activity does to the individual and the community and what purpose the economic transaction serves.
After Elder Oaks’s 1987 treatment and President Hinckley’s 2005 general conference address, more than two decades passed without a comparable major apostolic address devoted specifically to gambling.
So why now?
Modern Gambling
Modern gambling has proliferated in new forms, including sports betting and prediction markets.
Utah is involved in a lawsuit against the trading platform Kalshi, a federally regulated prediction market. Kalshi is appealing a federal district court ruling that permits Utah to enforce its anti-gambling laws against the platform. Utah argues that Kalshi transactions constitute gambling. Kalshi argues that its trades are derivatives, financial contracts whose value depends on an underlying asset, benchmark, or event.
As novel trading platforms emerge, it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish what exactly constitutes gambling from the inherent risk of business transactions. Kalshi’s argument that its trades are simply derivatives is one example.
I have some experience with derivative financing. During a 2020 conversation with Marco Midence, then Honduras’s finance minister, he described the economic damage that followed a sharp decline in coffee prices. He told me that Honduras had lost approximately $114 million in coffee revenue, attributing the losses to plummeting Vietnamese coffee prices, which he said caused significant losses for family growers who lacked the necessary sophistication to hedge against price declines through financial transactions.
The counter to vice architecture is virtuous architecture.
I proposed a government intermediary that could aggregate the growers’ exposure and arrange a price-floor contract on their behalf. Under this arrangement, growers would pay for protection against catastrophic price declines without becoming sophisticated derivatives traders themselves.
Discussions with the Central American Bank for Economic Integration and the International Monetary Fund indicated that such a structure could potentially be arranged without Honduras itself becoming the direct hedge counterparty.
Not every such proposal is necessarily wise, nor does every hedge succeed. But financial contracts can be used to transfer and manage risks that arise from real economic activity.
That is fundamentally different from creating a financial position for the purpose of wagering on an uncertain outcome.
But sidestepping the legal question of whether Kalshi trades constitute gambling or derivatives, I want to evaluate the trades through the lens of vice architecture. This is the result:
- Does it produce immediate gratification or excitement—often leading to a cycle of repeated use or dependence? Yes
- Does it entice us to subordinate long-term interests to immediate gratification or excitement? Yes
- Does it create a cycle of anticipation, reward, and repetition? Yes
- Does it consume resources—money, time, attention, health, or relationships—with an associated opportunity cost? Yes
- Does it impose costs on spouses, families, communities, or others? Yes
- Does it erode personal autonomy—creating a growing dependence on the appetite? Yes
What Should Money Be Doing?
Years ago, while I was an intern at The Prudential Insurance Company of America, I worked with a roughly $180 million social investment fund. The fund invested in minority-owned banks, shopping centers, and other for-profit projects in communities that conventional capital often overlooked.
Through that work, I came to know Monsignor William J. Linder, a Catholic priest in Newark, New Jersey. Father Linder was the founder of New Community Corporation, one of the nation’s major community development organizations. I worked closely with him on a neighborhood shopping center project and came to have enormous respect and affection for him.
One day I was volunteering at a soup kitchen in Newark. I was sent into the pantry to get a can of corn. As I looked along the shelves, I noticed that nearly every label said “Deseret.”
I mentioned it to Father Linder.
He explained that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints supplied a significant portion of the canned goods used by the kitchen.
I then told him that I was a member of the Church.
That conversation led to an invitation. I invited Father Linder to Salt Lake City to tour the Church’s welfare operations and later to lecture at the Marriott School at BYU as part of its entrepreneurial lecture series.
He accepted, toured the welfare system, and spoke to the students.
I still remember one of the management students’ responses:
“Everyone who has spoken here so far has told us how we can get ahead. This is the first lecturer to tell us how to get others ahead.”
Father Linder understood money and investment. But he also understood that capital could accomplish things that a financial statement might not fully capture. A shopping center could create jobs. A business could anchor a neighborhood. A loan could allow a community to participate in an economy from which it had been excluded.
The counter to vice architecture is virtuous architecture. Father Linder understood the difference. So should we.
We can recognize virtuous architecture by asking a corresponding set of questions:
- Does it direct an appetite, resource, or capacity toward a good beyond immediate gratification?
- Does it entice us to subordinate immediate gratification to something of enduring value?
- Does its repetition cultivate a virtuous disposition and an increasingly Christlike character?
- Does it create or preserve real value—economic, relational, physical, intellectual, or spiritual?
- Does it produce benefits that extend to families, communities, and others?
- Does it strengthen personal autonomy—our capacity to govern appetites rather than be governed by them?
- Is there an accompanying manifestation of the Holy Spirit?
Father Linder understood the difference. So should we.
