The charge of hypocrisy often gets levelled at the church, and those who wear their convictions publicly must expect that.
So it didn’t surprise me when people were astonished that bishops were among those in the House of Lords who joined with others to defeat the proposed super-casino.

“Surely, parish fetes often have raffles and tombolas, don’t they?”
I was asked.
Of course they do. And many small organisations derive enjoyment and funds from small-scale games of chance.
They’re not addictive, and ticket prices are not at a level that will affect people’s ability to put food on the table. Some object in conscience even to small-scale gambling of that kind, on the grounds that it prepares the way for the much larger gambling industry that now exists.
But this is a case where size makes all the difference.
When the National Lottery started many warned that it would effectively mean that many public activities would come to depend on it, and so indeed it has proved.
From sports arenas to opera houses, community projects to church restoration, many organisations are driven to seek lottery funding because that has now become a precondition for getting money from other charities.
Not only that: the Government is under less pressure to fund such things than it would otherwise be because lottery funding is seen as a widely available source.
The super-casino would, no doubt, have generated some funding for the areas in which it was situated – though along with it would have come many undesirable social developments too, as it turned into a magnet for organised crime.
But funding urban regeneration from the crumbs of the gambling industry is a bad strategy.
Poor people often feel, understandably, that a gambling win is their only likely way out of poverty and are therefore attracted to gambling more than others.
The result is that it is effectively the poorest who are funding, through the lottery and other gambling developments, projects which, if they were funded out of taxation, would be burdens spread more justly in the community.
So I think the small-scale games of chance at community and church fetes are in a quite different category, and the large-scale development of gambling is to be resisted. I was against the lottery when it started, and am even more against it now.