No One Is More Blasé About Gambling Than Americans, According To Pew Study

Albert Einstein, speaking about his discomfort concerning quantum mechanics, famously noted, “God does not play dice.”

While God not playing dice may or may not be true — a little quantum humor there — religious people in America are slightly less likely to be OK with gambling than non-religious people. 

That’s one takeaway from a Pew Research Center study, and we’ll get back to that in a minute, but the real news out of this study?

Americans, at 70%, are just a shade below Canadians (71%) in saying that gambling is either “morally acceptable” or “not a moral issue.” And we lap the field at 50% (Canada is second at 41%) in going the “not a moral issue” route.

In short, Americans are pretty much ¯\(ツ)/¯ when it comes to gambling and morals.

So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.

In addition to our friends to the north, Australia is next on the list of countries that are accepting of gambling, at 67%.

But gambling is not so cool everywhere. For instance, Indonesia, India, and Turkey are the bottom three countries surveyed when it comes to seeing gambling as morally acceptable, at 11%, 14%, and 17%, respectively.

Over in Europe, most countries are at least at 50% acceptance, with France at 66% taking the lead. But Italians? They look more like Indonesia, with an acceptance rate of only 27%. Whaddaya gonna do?

Back to the States …

Interestingly, despite our sky-high rate of moral acceptance of gambling, our number has actually gone down since the last time Pew asked about this. While 30% of Americans currently find gambling morally unacceptable, that number was at 24% in 2013. The folks at Pew didn’t ask “why” this may be, but one rather obvious reason is that back in 2013, PASPA was still the law of the land. Only New Jersey was sniffing online casinos. Kalshi and Polymarket were as real as Snow White. And no one was bombarded with millions of DraftKings and FanDuel commercials.

So … maybe the speed and breadth of gambling legalization in America have turned some folks off of it.

But two groups who are wholly OK with it are … atheists and agnostics. Atheists check in at a 90% morally acceptable rate, with agnostics a click behind at 83%. 

Catholics and Jews are also fine and dandy with their gambling, checking in with morally acceptable rates of 74% and 75%, respectively. Protestants, on the other hand, are a little less likely to be copacetic with weekly bingo games, with a 66% acceptance rate.

Politics and more

Much like everything else in America, there’s a noticeable split between people who lean left compared to people who lean right.

Nearly one in three right-leaning Americans find gambling morally unacceptable, compared to one in four of those who lean left.

Perhaps just the slightest bit worrying for gambling operators in America, when it comes to age cohorts, the youngest generation (those 18-29) has the lowest level of moral acceptance when it comes to gambling. They sit at 67%, with the 50-64 age range being the most accepting, at 74%.

Some of that might be due to this last bit of information: Households making over $80,000 a year check in with a 77% acceptance rate, while households making under $30,000 check in at 61%.