Christianity Today October 30, 2026 6 min signal 2026-10-30

A college-town bar as hushed as a church

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Getty / Tim Warner

College student Ryan Cass woke up on a college-football Saturday feeling lucky. He put together a 15-part parlay and hoped that every component of the bet would hit.

Off he went to the parking lot of Kyle Field. From a Texas A&M tailgate, he watched sections of his parlay play out in other stadiums around the country, streaming one game on his phone and catching another on a TV in the back of a car. The passes he wanted receivers to catch? Caught. The balls he hoped would be fumbled? Fumbled. He scanned his ticket and entered Kyle to cheer for his team in person. From the stands, he watched another leg succeed.

For the day’s final game, Cass headed to Chimy’s, a popular sports bar near A&M’s campus. Fourteen legs of his parlay had hit. Only one remained. Arizona, the underdog, would need to win by three touchdowns.

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Word spread around the bar. Soon, all its customers knew what was at stake for Cass. Arizona was ahead by two touchdowns. Then, miraculously, three. If the score held, the marathon bet would be complete. A college-town bar in Texas was suddenly as hushed as a church.

Arizona stopped its opponent at the one-yard line, securing the win.

And Cass had won: $11,000, to be exact.

Victories like his are the dream for the millions of young American men who bet on sports. Ever since the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that sports gambling’s legality should be left to the states, apps like DraftKings have spread from Oregon to Massachusetts, slipping bookies and casinos into pockets.

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And betting isn’t just for sports. Via prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, online gamblers can now put money on Oscar winners, papal conclaves, assassinations, and political campaigns. Lawmakers recently called for a ban on betting on wildfires, worried about incentivizing arson. Already by June 2026, over a billion dollars had been wagered this year on war operations, including by military personnel.

An estimated 27 percent of Americans have active sports betting accounts, but among men ages 18–49, the number rises to 52 percent. That puts college ministries in a tricky place—counseling their students about a pastime that Christians have historically understood as a vice but that many young men do not believe is wrong.

Ben Weber, a Campus Outreach employee who works at colleges in Alabama, likens the explosion in sports betting to the spread of pornography. “When I was a teenager, pornography was a magazine,” he remembers. Now, it’s all over the internet. “In the same way, sports betting has been around for a long time,” he said, “but it was contained to Vegas and Indian reservations.”

Griffin Oakley, a Gen Z seminarian from Nashville who began betting as soon as he turned 21, acknowledged the ease of online platforms. “In the past, one had to go in person and physically hand a bookie a bet,” he said. Now, “I can just bet in two seconds on my phone.” But for Oakley, online gambling shouldn’t be compared to porn. Instead, it’s a social activity that keeps him in touch with friends from home via a DraftKings group chat.

That nonchalance aligns with what other campus ministers are noticing. Stuart Gunner, the director of Campus Outreach at Ole Miss, observes that any frat house he walks into has sports on the TV and at least one guy has placed a bet on the game. There’s no stigma to betting for young men, he says, “no sense of guilt or shame surrounding it.”

“If you go to the casinos, you can see the negative impact of gambling because you see the 60-year-old man sitting at the roulette table during the middle of the day, and he is just trying to make something back,” he said. “With these college students, I think they’re just at the beginning of an addiction rather than at the end.”

Gunner doesn’t think betting is going anywhere. But he’s encouraging his students to seek community without the added adrenaline and its associated risks. “Can you actually put your phone down for two weeks and still go to the games with your friends, still watch the games with your friends, and not feel the pressure to put money into it?” he asks. The frat house living room, the stadium, the sports bar—winning parlay or not, they’ll still be there.

Mia Staub is senior editorial project manager at Christianity Today.

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