A Galloping Controversy:Church horsing around

Ian Boyne , Contributor

The Church should have no privileged status in this society. There should be no automatic deference to the Church, no unquestioning authority invested in it. The fact that Christianity is the majority religion provides no justification for the Church to impose its views on the society. The Church must certainly seek to influence, but rational humans must decide whether its positions make sense. Those positions are not inherently right.

The issue of Sunday horse racing provides yet another opportunity for us to discuss this matter of the Church in relation to the State. The separation of Church and State does not mean the Church must have no influence in the public square. The Jamaica Council of Churches is in its right to seek to influence government policy away from Sunday racing and it has every right to be passionate and vehement on the issue. Let no one seek to muzzle the Church on this issue.

But there is no reflexive philosophical justification of the Church's view on morality and ethics, and the days are far gone when the Church could hope to simply pronounce on issues and that was the end of the matter. The Church has no right to call on those outside its ecclesiastical jurisdiction to accept its dictum simply on faith. Let's rationally dissect this raging debate on Sunday horse racing and gambling in general.

First, this is a secular democracy. We are not a Christian nation in terms of having a state religion. The Church has absolutely no right to dictate to the society what it can and cannot do on its sacred days. Any sacred day it has is sacred to its adherents only. That cannot be imposed. A liberal democracy allows religious people to worship freely on their special days, whether Friday, Saturday or Sunday. But we religious people in a pluralistic democracy have no right to dictate the kinds of activities which can take place on our holy days.

No society which calls itself democratic and pluralistic should be giving credence to any one group determining acceptable activities on particular days. If Christians say, "Well, the majority of Jamaicans are Christians, and if they don't want certain activities on Sunday and democracy is about the majority, then it is democratic to forbid those activities on Sunday," I retort: Just listen to the vox pops, interviews, comments in the media - as unscientific as that is - and you will see that views on 'acceptable activities' on Sunday have changed rather significantly over the last few decades.

business activity on sunday

Well, look at practice itself. Look how many stores, gas stations and business places are open on Sunday. Look how many dancehall sessions are held on Sunday. Listen to the kind of music you can hear on Sundays now, compared to some years ago. And aren't the plazas open and beaming with activity on Sundays in December? Is Sunday only sacred 11 months of the year?

Besides, in case it crept up on you, the largest single denomination in Jamaica is the Seventh-day Adventist Church (whose world president is here this weekend, incidentally, to ensure it grows even more rapidly.) Not only is the Church unable to establish that Sunday is sacred, in my own view, but even if it could, it has no right to impose that sacredness on those outside its walls.

People must have the freedom to go to Caymanas Park on a Sunday if they want to. They must be able to go to off-track and betting outlets if they so desire to use their Sundays. It's called freedom of association. If they want to go to church, they will, and if they want to do both, that's their right too.

The arguments the Church has advanced against gambling have always struck me as pathetically weak. An example of that was the release issued by the JCC last weekend under the signature of the Rev Gary Harriott. In it, the JCC says gambling is immoral because "it is an artificially created risk for the purpose of gain without service; in such scheme, a few gain (mostly the owners and organisers) at the loss of the many".

I wonder whether the JCC knows why a global financial crisis erupted in 2008, with its genesis in the 2007 subprime crisis in the United States? I wonder whether it knows about the kinds of mystifying instruments and mechanisms created by the financial sector, and how those instruments and schemes bore no relation at all to production and real wealth? The growth of finance capitalism far outstrips the growth of production and trade today. These churchmen have to take their heads out of the Bible occasionally and understand what is happening in the real world.

They need to understand why the financialisation of the global economy is now called 'casino capitalism'! In other words, dear brethren in Christ, much of what constitutes 21st-century capitalism is disguised and not-so-subtly disguised gambling! A lot of the wealth being created now is paper wealth, and there is a lot of "artificially created risk for the purpose of gain without service". This is 21st-century capitalism you are describing, Brother Harriott!

casino capitalism

So rather than gambling having a peripheral role in modern economies, gambling and neo-gambling represent much of post-industrial capitalism. It's casino capitalism, indeed. Unless the Church is prepared to make this thorough-going critique of modern capitalism - which it usually is not - it cannot justifiably single out traditional gambling.

Even the argument about 'a few gaining' could be applied to capitalism in general, as the facts of global poverty and inequality show that only a few are gaining from all this enormous 'wealth' which the world is generating. The world's 500 richest people have a combined income greater than the poorest 416 million. Some 2.2 billion people live on less than US$2 a day - just five per cent of global income. The richest 20 per cent account for 75 per cent of the world's income. And the US$7 billion needed annually over the next few years to provide 2.6 billion people with access to clean water is less than what Europeans spend on perfume and less than what Americans spend on elective surgery!

These facts should be disturbing our church people far more than gambling at Caymanas Park. Two billion people lack access to essential medicines; more than one billion do not have adequate shelter, and two billion lack electricity, with 950 million chronically undernourished.

And let's deal with this idea that gambling is wrong because it represents 'getting something for nothing' and 'getting something for which you don't labour': Tell me, in the days of high interest rates when many people, including the churches, were earning enormous profits from simply putting money on instruments (I was one of them), wasn't that getting something for nothing? I earned handsome amounts for which I did absolutely nothing, but kept my money in high-yielding instruments.

In fact, people could do without working at all under the high-interest rate environment. How is that different in principle from gambling? And those of us who got those profits got them at the expense of the poor and the general society which suffered as result of high interest rates. There were many losers to the few of us who were 'winners'. Yes, gambling is parasitic, but so are various forms of financial instruments.

And the rejoinder that horse racing is different, for it contributes nothing of economic value to the society, is simply not true. It is estimated that horse racing is a $7-billion industry, employing many thousands of people. It earns foreign exchange, too. Certainly, we know Sunday racing can boost employment and small entrepreneurial activities (which is not in itself a justification, by the way - and this is a weak argument by pro-gambling people.)

service industry

But don't continue to make the unsubstantiated point that racing has no economic value while financial instruments represent investment in real companies. Not all of these companies are producing goods. The service economy creates value, and not because horse racing is not producing yams, plantains, electronic products, etc., it means it is not producing anything. There is something called the service industry, brothers and sisters in the Lord.

Another point Gary Harriott makes is that "the real incentive that makes people gamble is the hope of getting easy money". Well, that is exactly why people put money on financial instruments, Brother Gary. They want easy money. They could take that money and invest it to make toilet paper, but they don't, for that's hard work and hassle. I have never heard any condemnation of these people (but then it's not fashionable to castigate the well-to-do.) The JCC says that people become poorer by gambling, while gambling establishments become wealthier. The same could be said of many enterprises.

But the greater point is that poverty and underdevelopment are the real culprits, not gambling, which is a symptom and an effect. We must deal with root causes and challenge a system which keeps on reproducing poverty and marginalisation. We must take a holistic approach to development.

I don't gamble, and have no intention of ever gambling. But the common arguments advanced against gambling are weak and irrational. "Gambling exalts reliance on luck, not hard work," says Harriott. So what if one gambles for fun, is it still immoral? What if one escapes gambling's addictive allure, is it still inherently wrong to gamble? What if one has disposable income and gambling would not mean depriving the family of food? Is it still morally wrong and why?

"Gambling represents an improper use of wealth that God has given us and goes contrary to principles of Christian stewardship." But how is that different from gambling on the stock market? And how is it different from investing in the Ponzi schemes many Christians and church leaders lost money in? Why didn't the Church come out against those schemes, which ripped off people and which depended on exploitation to benefit a few?

And then how is gambling an improper use of wealth if one has discretionary income to blow? The arguments advanced against gambling are feckless and unfounded. No wonder so many reject them. The Church must stop horsing around with democracy and logic!

Ian Boyne, a veteran journalist, is the winner of the 2010-2011 Morris Cargill Award for Opinion Journalism. Email feedback to columns@ gleanerjm.com and ianboyne1@yahoo.com.