Having a religious affiliation doesn't stop people from betting on sports in the United States, according to a new study.
Results showed that people who infrequently attend religious services are more likely to gamble on sports than people who attend services at least weekly or who never worship publicly.
Catholics - and especially Catholic men - stood out in the data as a group most likely to engage in sports gambling.
Overall, researchers found that religious identity can be both a protective factor and a lubricant for sports gambling and that women, particularly women with religious affiliations, are less likely than men to place sports bets.
"Our findings suggest that sports gambling behaviors seem to be a function of religious identities, affiliations, cultures and practices, but in pretty nuanced ways," said Chris Knoester, co-author of the study and professor of sociology at The Ohio State University. "For most people, sports gambling seems to be an occasional and low-stakes hobby or leisure activity."
Knoester conducted the study with first author Laura Upenieks, associate professor of sociology at Baylor University.
"There has been this longstanding assumption that religion discourages gambling. And we wanted to test that core assumption," Upenieks said. "One of the things you'll find in our results is that different religious traditions treat gambling very differently, and that religion doesn't uniformly suppress sports gambling in the United States."
The research was published today (April 28, 2026) in the Sociology of Sport Journal.
The study used survey data on 3,701 adults who participated in the National Sports and Society Survey (NSASS), sponsored by Ohio State's Sports and Society Initiative. Those surveyed volunteered to participate through the American Population Panel, run by Ohio State's Center for Human Resource Research.
Participants between the ages of 21 and 65, who came from all 50 states, answered the survey online between the fall of 2018 and the spring of 2019 - not too long after the May 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned a federal ban on sports betting that had prohibited sports gambling in most states for 25 years.
With legal U.S. sportsbooks now taking in over $150 billion in bets annually and in light of pervasive marketing of sports betting opportunities, the researchers sought to better understand where religion fits into patterns and predictors of adult sports gambling behavior.
For this analysis, Upenieks and Knoester looked at the likelihood that U.S. adults ever gambled on sports over the previous year, how much money they reported gambling on sports, and how much money they won or lost on those bets. Methods of gambling ranged from traditional betting on game winners and point spreads to participation in fantasy leagues and entering March Madness bracket pools.
The survey asked respondents about religious affiliation and frequency of attending religious services in addition to collecting data on education, race/ethnicity, social class and sexuality. The sample is disproportionately made up of women and people who are white and college educated.
Overall, 17% of respondents (616 people) reported betting on sports in the previous year, which broke down by sex to about 20% of men and 15% of women who took the survey. On average, respondents invested $57 in sports bets - an average of $46 for women and $91 for men - and, among those who gambled, reported winning $165.
"The average person is not gambling thousands of dollars. The average hardcore gambler very well may be, but the average U.S. adult is not," Knoester said. "The study suggests that sports gambling is not overwhelmingly common, nor do most people allocate a great deal of money to sports gambling. In fact, people actually reported winning money from doing so, on average - although we are suspicious of that having actually been the case."
While he and Upenieks expected to see a negative association between frequent religious service attendance and sports gambling, they found instead that respondents who attended worship services once or twice a year were most likely to gamble on sports and to report investing more money than people who did not attend services.
"This result complicates the assertion that any exposure to religion is necessarily protective against morally risky or deviant behavior," they wrote in the paper.
And while Protestants were predicted to be the least likely to gamble on sports, the analysis specifically singled out Catholics as more likely to bet on sports than people who identified as atheist, agnostic or with no religious affiliation and Protestants. Catholics also reported the largest sports gambling expenses.
Here, gender differences were apparent, as well. Catholic women had a 19% probability of betting on sports in the past year compared to a 45% probability for Catholic men.
"If we think about Catholic teachings and what's gone on in parishes, gambling has been seen as more morally permissible, within limits. And we see that carrying over into sports betting here," Upenieks said.
Though the results can't clarify the means of influence religious affiliation and participation may have on gambling, she said people who are "halfway in and halfway out" are likely to experience different outcomes.
"In the context of gambling, people who are infrequently attending religious services could be thought of as being in a moral gray zone: Religion isn't strong enough to discourage gambling, but the cultural approval of sports betting could potentially fill that gap," Upenieks said.
The findings have public health and policy implications and could help inform efforts to reduce harms associated with gambling, she said.
"People have been gambling on sports forever," Knoester said. "This research matters because, especially in these times, with the proliferation of sports gambling, we need to have more information and continued conversations about the extent to which people engage in sports gambling, why, and to what effect."
