What Happened to Church Bingo and the State Lottery?

Church bingo once served as a major source of community financing, but was gradually displaced by state lotteries. Lotteries inherited bingo’s moral legitimacy by promising to fund education and scholarships. Yet the evolution from bingo to lotteries and ultimately, to digital gambling, demonstrates a move toward much more behaviorally-addictive gambling and greater health risks.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, church bingo occupied an important place in American civic life. Catholic parishes, veterans’ organizations, volunteer fire departments, and nonprofit groups relied on weekly bingo nights to support schools, youth athletics, and charitable activities. Bingo wasn’t seen as gambling in the modern sense. Instead, it was perceived as a socially legitimate community activity supporting civic participation while raising money for local institutions.

Gambling opportunities expanded dramatically as consumers migrated toward lotteries, tribal gaming, casinos, slot machines, online betting, and eventually, mobile sports wagering. When Indiana reports that charitable bingo revenues fell by nearly 50% between 1990 and 1995 as commercial gambling expanded, that reflects an absolute decline in nominal or real revenue collected by charitable bingo operations. Pennsylvania and Nebraska experienced similar declines. Younger generations increasingly preferred gambling products offering larger jackpots, faster play, and greater stimulation. Surveys suggest the average lottery player is in their late forties or fifties, whereas online sports bettors are typically younger adults, often under age thirty-five. Absolute revenue decline for traditional charitable gambling, declining market share within the overall gambling sector, and lower net return to charities or education per gambling dollar wagered have been reported.

State lotteries inherited much of bingo’s moral and political legitimacy. Beginning in the 1970s, lotteries were promoted as public instruments for funding education without raising taxes. Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship became the most prominent example, while Florida, Tennessee, New Mexico, and South Carolina also created lottery-funded educational programs.

For years, this model was successful because lotteries occupied dominant positions in legal gambling markets. The underlying assumption was that lottery revenues would remain stable and continue growing indefinitely. State lotteries occupied an important transitional stage in this progression. Lotteries also normalized gambling participation on a mass scale. Over time, states became financially dependent on gambling revenues to support education and public programs.

Then the gambling economy changed profoundly. Americans are not gambling less; they are gambling differently. Gambling expanded overall, but the proportion of gambling expenditures returning to community or educational purposes may have diminished. Gambling expenditures are now fragmented across online sports betting, mobile wagering apps, internet casinos, fantasy sports, esports betting, and other app-based gambling platforms. In many states, more than 90 percent of sports wagers are placed on smartphones rather than in physical sportsbooks, illustrating the rapid shift toward continuous mobile gambling. Unlike weekly bingo games or periodic lottery drawings, modern digital gambling platforms are designed around continuous participation. Earlier forms of gambling imposed natural limits because wagers and outcomes were separated by hours or days, and casinos or racetracks required physical travel. In contrast, online sports betting and digital casinos compress the interval between a wager and a reward to seconds or minutes, making gambling available at any time on mobile devices. These digital gambling products increasingly operate on reinforcement schedules similar to those used in social media and gaming platforms. Continuous betting opportunities, instant rewards, near-miss experiences, and frictionless mobile payments intensify player involvement and repetitive wagering behavior. As a result, mobile sports betting and online casinos increasingly resemble high-intensity gambling environments marked by immediacy, personalization, and near-constant accessibility.

New Jersey illustrates this transition particularly well. Historically dominated by lotteries, racetracks, and Atlantic City casinos, the state now generates enormous gambling activity through online casinos and mobile sports betting. Sports betting has surpassed $11 billion annually, reflecting the shift from place-based to smartphone-based gambling. Georgia presents a different but equally revealing example. Although it lacks commercial casinos, younger consumers increasingly gamble through sports betting apps and fantasy sports rather than traditional lotteries, undermining lottery systems that support programs such as the HOPE Scholarship.

As gambling markets grew more competitive, lotteries themselves became increasingly commercialized. States expanded scratch-off games, promoted larger jackpots, intensified advertising, and adopted more aggressive marketing strategies to preserve sales volume. Although lottery sales remained enormous — exceeding $113 billion nationally in fiscal year 2024 — commercial casinos, sports betting, and internet gaming expanded far more rapidly, reducing lotteries’ share of the overall gambling economy. Younger consumers increasingly preferred gambling experiences that were continuous, mobile, interactive, and capable of delivering instant outcomes with repeated behavioral reinforcement. Modern digital gambling products are associated with greater addictive potential because they dramatically increase “event frequency” — the number of wagering opportunities available per hour. By 2025, online sports betting and internet casino gambling were generating tens of billions of dollars annually in wagers, while mobile platforms accounted for the overwhelming majority of sports betting activity in most states where sports betting was legal.

This creates an important policy problem. Many states built scholarship systems and educational budgets on the assumption of stable lottery growth. In many states, lottery revenues “for education” did not necessarily increase total education spending; instead, they replaced existing appropriations, freeing general funds for other uses.

Yet younger gamblers are steadily migrating toward gambling platforms whose revenues often flow primarily to private operators rather than educational trust funds.

Even as total gambling revenues expanded, the net incremental benefit to education frequently proved smaller than public messaging suggested. Consumer migration toward higher-intensity commercial gambling products reduced the share of gambling expenditures directed to charitable or educational purposes, as an increasing share was allocated to prize payouts, operator profits, advertising, and administrative overhead.

If lottery participation or net return declines while states remain unwilling or unable to raise taxes, legislatures may confront widening educational funding gaps or increasing pressure to expand even more aggressive gambling products to sustain revenues.

At the same time, public-health concerns about gambling continue to grow. Public-health researchers estimate that approximately 1 to 2 percent of Americans develop gambling disorder during their lifetimes, with many more experiencing significant gambling-related financial and psychological harms below full diagnostic thresholds. Research by gambling expert Marc Potenza and colleagues found adolescent lottery purchasers demonstrated higher rates of gambling problems, impulsivity, and substance use compared with nonparticipants. Young adults represent one of the fastest-growing populations participating in online sports betting, raising concerns because earlier age of gambling exposure is associated with higher long-term addiction risk. Online and mobile gambling platforms may intensify many of these risks because they operate continuously with few time or space barriers. Gambling is now integrated directly into smartphones, sports broadcasts, social media, and online payment systems. Following the Supreme Court’s 2018 Murphy v. NCAA decision, legal sports betting increased from roughly $5 billion in legal bets before legalization to well over $150 billion nationally by 2024.

Although charitable gambling was not free of addiction risks, its pace and social structure imposed limits largely absent from modern digital gambling platforms. The decline of church bingo, therefore, represents far more than a nostalgic cultural shift. It demonstrates a broader transformation in American gambling, public finance, technology, and addiction. Americans did not stop gambling. What changed was the nature of gambling itself: from community-based, socially constrained activities to increasingly sophisticated digital systems designed to maximize consumer participation and continuous participation.