Drowning Church clutching at straws

By Orville Higgins

Horse-racing aficionados want the 'Sport of Kings' at Caymanas Park to be extended to Sundays, but the Church is having none of it. The Church has a right, indeed a duty, to try to keep all on the 'straight and narrow', and part of its remit is to lay down a moral marker.

To deprive the Church of its right to speak out against such issues is to deprive it of its raison d'être.

My difficulty with the Church, however, is the absence of a cogent, consistent position on its problem with Sunday racing. Not one of the reasons I have heard from the Jamaica Council of Churches (JCC) so far stands up to scrutiny.

Indeed, different denominations within the JCC have reasoned differently on the issue, and in-between all the reasons given, one is confused as to what is their real position.

I have heard Christians arguing against gambling on the basis that Christ condemned it when he stormed into a temple and blasted all and sundry for making His Father's house a "den of thieves". The truth is that those inside the temple weren't gambling, certainly not in the sense that we have come to understand the term. They were involved in the business of money-changing, and this drew the wrath of Jesus himself.

So the Church has been forced to look elsewhere to rationalise its position. And it's struggling, in my view.

A few days ago, I spoke on radio to Gary Harriott, the general secretary of the JCC. His position was that the Church was against gambling for two main reasons. One is that gambling promoted "poor stewardship of one's money". In other words, the Church is against gambling because it thinks people could put their money to better use.

I told the goodly reverend, who sounded like a bright, affable gentleman, that I couldn't accept that. You can't condemn an activity simply because a lot of people pour into it earnings which you believe could have been be transferred elsewhere. If that is so, the Church should have an issue with so many other social pleasures, from the buying of ice cream, to spending tens of thousands of dollars for a weekend at the Jamaica Jazz and Blues Festival.

A man's spending is his choice

Not the 'best stewardship of one's money' is too subjective, too emotional an issue for the Church to take a stand against anything. Who determines what is proper stewardship of one's money? The man who gambles a thousand dollars at Caymanas Park could well argue that that is a more prudent use of his money than the man who takes a vacation in Honolulu.

What one does with one's disposable income is a matter of choice and taste. Spending this disposable income often does not follow any rational or objective lines.

One could always argue that the pastor who lives in a big house and drives a hot car is not exercising the best stewardship of his money. People justify their vices on the basis of what makes them happy and comfortable, and nobody else, except the person himself or herself, can measure that.

The Church is on very shaky ground when it argues against gambling on the basis of money purportedly being improperly spent. Telling people what to do with their money is not in the Church's remit.

Mr Harriott's second reason was that gambling is wrong, because it wasn't "neighbourly", because, essentially, you are trying to take your neighbour's money without working for it.

This seems to me like the Church is clutching at straws. There can be nothing 'unneighbourly' about a cadre of people, many times unknown to each other, who place their money in a pool, with the understanding that the pot goes to the lucky ones who make the right guess.

All participants are aware of the rules, and as long as you do it of your own volition, there can't be anything unneighbourly about that.

Gambling does attract a lot of ne'er-do-wells, and subconsciously maybe this is the real reason why the Church is against it.

My view, though, is that the Church should leave Sunday racing alone. The Church has been relatively silent about racing on Saturday, which is considered a holy day by a whole legion of Christians, Jews and others, and therefore this hard-line stance against Sunday racing seems unfair and ill-conceived.

Orville Higgins is the 2011 winner of the Hugh Crosskill/Raymond Sharpe Award for Sports Reporting. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.