McKay Coppins

It's just that I think there is a little bit of discomfort in some quarters of the church that Mormonism will come to be seen as all these sort of pop cultural indicators.

The reality shows the weird soda cocktails that everybody drinks and then not actually be identified by their religious beliefs.

I think that at least some in the church, I think some church leaders are sort of grappling with what that means for them going forward.

I believe in you more than I've ever believed in myself.

Why?

Well, it started as an assignment to basically look into and write a reported piece about the explosive growth of the sports betting industry in America and what it's doing to the culture, right?

And as I was kind of making my reporting plans, I ticked off all the boxes that you would expect I wanted to talk to.

people who struggled with gambling addiction.

I wanted to talk to the executives at the big sports books.

I wanted to talk to athletes and try to understand the issue from all their perspectives.

But my editors kind of at the very beginning said, well, you know, you really should try to experience the phenomenon firsthand.

And when I told them, you know, that's fine, but I have certain religious constraints.

You know, my faith prohibits me from gambling.

They came up with this

sort of spiritual workaround, which is kind of ridiculous, but it did work out.

They basically proposed that they would stake me $10,000 to gamble with over the course of the upcoming NFL season.

They would cover my losses and we would split any winnings 50-50.

And the idea was to try to simulate the kind of emotional investment in gambling that the average sports gambler has.

But because it wasn't my money, their theory was, well, God will approve of it, which I will say I ran that idea by my bishop just to see what he thought.

And he sort of tentatively gave his blessing, even if he wasn't wild about the idea.