I’m not a particularly big football fan. I support Crystal Palace because their playing grounds are close to where I grew up, and I had a particularly 1970s Eagles school bag while I was doing that growing up. I’ve been to a few football matches, watched a few more on television and play football twice a week with a bunch of people who are clearly better than me.
In this fascinating article, Ryan Maher is talking about American football rather than real football, but I think the principles are the same. In fact he’s talking about how to discuss faith in a meaningful way with those of other faiths, in the context of his work in Doha.
This template for discussing religion and faith is fundamentally flawed. It presumes that different groups of faithful people approach their religions in the same way football fans approach their favorite teams: I cheer passionately for mine, you cheer passionately for yours, and we all agree to play by the rules and exhibit good sportsmanship. For people of faith, religion isn’t like that.
Actually, football isn’t like that either. That’s a very strange view of sport – a matter of etiquette rather than passion. I don’t believe that Chelsea are any good, not on the basis of the empirical evidence but because I don’t like Chelsea. I don’t believe that Crystal Palace are any good, but if people ask I’ll still say I support them. I don’t think that England are much good, but I’ll still be jumping out of my chair whenever they win a match with a goal in the last two minutes.
Good sportsmanship has its place on the pitch; off the pitch, the barracking that opposing supporters give each other is seldom good-natured and sometimes spills over into violence. So perhaps it would be more useful to see religion as exactly like sport – pursued by different people for different ends and in different ways, and occasionally with more agreement between people of different faiths than with those of their co-religionists?