Gambling with God: the effect of gambling on religious and spiritual struggles

ABSTRACT

Religion and spirituality are often related to various addictive behaviors, such as substance use disorders, excessive internet pornography use, and Gambling Disorder. However, presently, very few published articles have considered the relationship between Gambling Disorder and negative aspects of religion and spirituality such as religious and spiritual struggles. This study aimed to better understand how problem gambling severity may be uniquely associated with religious and spiritual struggles, both cross-sectionally and over time. The study used secondary data from a longitudinal MTurk Survey (n = 764; follow-up n = 342) and controlled for neuroticism, age, gender, income, and gambling preference. Problem gambling severity was uniquely associated with several types of religious and spiritual struggles at baseline and most struggles at a six-month follow-up, even after controlling for baseline levels of such struggles. Further research is necessary to understand the nature of these links and how they might inform clinical care.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• spirituality
• problem gambling
• religious and spiritual struggles
• gambling disorder

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for Harold Rosenberg’s and Dara Musher-Eizenman’s helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics approval

Ethical approval was waived by the Institutional Review Board at Bowling Green State University for this work because it solely utilised secondary data and, therefore, did not meet the definition for human subjects’ research.

Availability of data and material

Data will be made available upon request to the corresponding author.

Notes

1 Authors also analysed the data after excluding all individuals who reported no problem gambling (SOGS<1), leaving a sample size of 602. These results (available at: https://osf.io/srvd7/) were very similar to the results presented here, thus we have presented those with the highest power.

2 Authors also analysed the RSS at Time 2 after including all RSS at baseline in step 1 (Supplementary Table S5: https://osf.io/srvd7/), results of which were similar to those presented here.

Additional information

Funding

We thank the International Center for Responsible Gaming (ICRG) for the seed grant awarded to Joshua B. Grubbs that funded the collection of this dataset.