Opposition to Tenn. lottery focuses on economic, policy issues

Bobby Ross Jr

Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2002 | 9:44 a.m.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- It's a moral issue. It's not a moral issue.

That's the dilemma faced by Tennessee lottery opponents fighting to keep the Bible Belt state from joining 47 other states with some form of legalized gambling.

While the anti-lottery campaign's hopes of defeating today's referendum depend heavily on a grass roots Christian army, opposition leaders purposely avoid casting the vote as a sin issue.

Instead, they treat it as a policy and economic matter.

"To win, we could not make it a preacher issue," said the Rev. Paul Durham, a Southern Baptist pastor and treasurer for the Gambling Free Tennessee Alliance. "We had to make it a truth issue."

The campaign's lack of Bible thumping reflects political and theological realities in the battle over a referendum that would lift a constitutional ban on a lottery in Tennessee.

Polls have consistently shown most Tennesseans -- those in the pews and otherwise -- see no inherent evil in the concept of a lottery.

"Since 47 states have gambling, I would have to think God's not really against it," said state Sen. Steve Cohen, D-Memphis, the state's chief lottery proponent.

Only Tennessee, Hawaii and Utah have no legalized gambling.

To be sure, some preach unabashedly that Scriptures teach against gambling.

"The principle is honest wage for honest labor and gambling in no way fits with that," Dan Cottrell, minister of the Southern Hills Church of Christ in Franklin, told his congregation recently. "Gambling is based upon greed and that makes it a form of covetousness."

Like Cottrell, James Porch, executive director of the Tennessee Baptist Convention, said he considers gambling a sin.

But in 3.2 million anti-lottery leaflets distributed to Southern Baptist churches statewide, the convention took a different tack, arguing that lotteries hurt children, the poor and the economy and don't do much to help education.

Supporters estimate a lottery would gross about $900 million a year. Of that, about half would go to prizes and one-sixth to administrative costs and ticket vendors. The remaining third -- roughly $300 million -- would fund college scholarships, preschool programs and school construction.

In recent advertising, the Gambling Free Tennessee Alliance used the slogan "Not This Lottery!" and attacked the ballot measure on grounds that the lottery wouldn't buy K-12 textbooks, improve teacher salaries or help the state's general budget.

"It's just so hypocritical and inconsistent," said Cohen, who has pushed for a lottery for 18 years. "If their argument is that lotteries are bad, that they prey on the poor ... then they should be for no lottery."

Cohen, who leads the pro-lottery Tennessee Student Scholarship Lottery Coalition, accuses evangelical Christian leaders of spreading "misrepresentations and falsehoods" in a desperate attempt to defeat the lottery.

"What they're doing is what the polls tell them to do, not what they truly believe," Cohen said. "It all comes back to morals and religion and an anti-government bias."

But Rubel Shelly, minister of the Woodmont Hills Church of Christ in Nashville, said opponents have legitimate concerns.

"It's unfortunate that Sen. Cohen has pitched it as sort of a 'Church Lady' crowd against the rest of the people," said Shelly, an anti-lottery alliance board member. "It's not that at all."

Shelly said he knows many church members who wager a meal on a game of golf or pay to enter a charity tournament offering potential prizes.

"I don't think that's immoral," he said.

Michael Gilstrap, Gambling Free Tennessee Alliance campaign director, said anti-lottery forces haven't made the fight a sin issue "because we don't believe that."

Gilstrap, a Roman Catholic who grew up playing bingo, said he sees nothing scandalous about gambling per se. It's a state-sponsored lottery that concerns him, he said.

The Tennessee Catholic Public Policy Commission, which includes the state's three Roman Catholic bishops, opposes a lottery as a poor method of funding state government.

United Methodist leaders reject gambling as a menace to society that's detrimental to moral, social, economic and spiritual life, said the Rev. Charles "Skip" Armistead, a Methodist minister and chairman of Religious Leaders for a Gambling Free Tennessee.

In Alabama, evangelical Christians used a grass roots campaign featuring yard signs, T-shirts, rallies, prayer vigils and sermons to defeat a proposed state lottery in 1999.

A year later, the so-called religious right tried a similar strategy in South Carolina -- and lost.

Some critics described the South Carolina opposition as too church-minded and moralistic. In Alabama, they said, the battle also relied on business and political leaders attacking the lottery on economic and policy grounds.

Kevin Geddings, a political consultant who produced a pro-lottery TV ad in Tennessee, managed the successful South Carolina campaign.

"I think the bottom line was clearly a majority of people in South Carolina who go to Sunday school and go to church every week voted for the lottery," Geddings said. "I guess the (anti-lottery) folks in Tennessee figured that out."