How I came to love my new neighbours

Moving to Liverpool, home to the team he hated, challenges football supporter Sam Tomlin’s sense of belonging.

Sam Tomlin

Sam Tomlin is a Salvation Army officer, leading a local church in Liverpool where he lives with his wife and children.

Silouhetted by red flare smoke, celebrating footballs wave red flags.

Liverpool football fans celebrate.

Fleur on Unsplash.

I was born in Exeter, England but my family moved to Oxford when I was two. I don’t remember Exeter at all. I am sometimes envious of people who proudly share how they were ‘born and bred’ in a city or town and trace their lineage there back generations. I profoundly identified with Nick Hornby in his brilliant book Fever Pitch when he describes being a white, middle-class, southern English man or woman as being ‘the most rootless creature on earth; we would rather belong to any other community in the world. Yorkshiremen, Lancastrians, Scots, the Irish… have something they can sit in pubs and bars and weep about, songs to sing, things they can grab for and squeeze hard when they feel like it, but we have nothing, or at least nothing we want.’

I began to love football and started attending games. My Dad, born in Bristol, took me to Oxford United and while I enjoyed going with my friends, I could tell he didn’t care as much when Oxford scored compared to when we went to Bristol City games when I would see a normally calm and controlled man hug random strangers and fall over seats. This is much more exciting – so I committed myself as a Bristol City fan which I am to this day.

Growing up in a school in Oxford, however, it’s not particularly cool to say you support Bristol City, so if you supported a lower league team you also pick a Premier League team. Mine was Manchester United for the very unoriginal reason that they were the best. I had posters of Roy Keane – my hero on whom I modelled my playing style and I even travelled up to Old Trafford when a ticket very occasionally presented itself. They were my second team – and a very close second.

Over the years I have come to deeply love the streets, landmarks and people who call this home as I have lived and served alongside them.

When you support a football team, you also commit to disliking other teams as part of the deal. Most teams have a local rival they enjoy hating, and while I certainly disliked Bristol Rovers, my particular ire was reserved for Liverpool, partly because they were Man Utd’s main rivals in the late 90’s and partly because some of my friends supported them (for the same reason I’ve always had an irrational dislike of QPR but that’s another story). I really disliked Liverpool – I didn’t quite have a poster of Michael Owen or Phil Babb to throw darts at but it wasn’t far off. Football rivalry is a serious business – in the 70’s and 80’s people lost their lives to football hooliganism and while this has thankfully decreased in recent decades, additional police presence is still required at local derbies as passions continue to run high.

I feel quite vulnerable sharing this publicly because it’s something I’ve never shared with the congregation I’ve been leading with my wife for over seven years. The reason for this is that we now live in Liverpool. God, it seems, has a great sense of irony – we became Salvation Army officers and not choosing where we were sent, the letter we opened in 2016 telling us where we would be ‘appointed’ said: Liverpool!

'The very first person you meet is the neighbour, whom you shall love… There is not a single person in the whole world who is as surely and as easily recognised as the neighbour.’

Søren Kierkegaard

Jesus says that the greatest commandments are to love God with everything that you are, and to love your neighbour as yourself. In response to a question about ‘who’ our true neighbours are, he shares a story about a man on a journey far from home who is beaten up and left for dead. His compatriots walk on the other side of the road, but someone from another, distrusted and strange land comes and takes care of him.

Søren Kierkegaard reflects on these stories and observes how humans like to abstract these commands to suit us better. We think our neighbours are those who look and sound like us as much as possible – this is the impulse of patriotism or love of country. But I have never been to Middleborough, Lincoln, or Dundee and while these people might be my compatriots, they are not really my neighbours – to some extent my love for them is an abstraction from reality. For Kierkegaard, ‘The very first person you meet is the neighbour, whom you shall love… There is not a single person in the whole world who is as surely and as easily recognised as the neighbour.’ In this regard, Kierkegaard suggests, Christian loyalty and love is more appropriately applied to a neighbourhood, town or city than it is to a nation or country (this essay by Stephen Backhouse explains more on this with reference to Kierkegaard).

The people I meet every day, walking around the streets of Liverpool are my neighbours and as such I am commanded as a follower of Jesus to love them. This love of God has not only helped me fall in love with a city I once did not know, but even transform something as ingrained as football rivalry. The most fundamental and formative songs I sing are about Jesus, not of a city and the narrative I try and organise my life around is found in the Bible not the history of a city or football club. But we are embodied creatures, and God creates us in and calls us to particular places, where we live, breathe and encounter our neighbours. I don’t think I’d go as far as saying I have become a Liverpool fan! I would still want Liverpool to lose if they played Bristol City and Man Utd, but the God who is able to transform even the deepest hatred into love has softened the heart of this southern, middle-class boy into a love of his new city, its people and perhaps even one of its football teams I once intensely disliked.

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Identity

Justice

Politics

17 April 2025

3 min read

Deeper conversations on gender will continue after this court ruling

Can the whole mystery of gender be conceded to brute biological fact?

Jack Chisnall

Jack Chisnall is a former gag teller and Oxford Theology graduate, combining the two at Holy Fooling.

A paiting shows four panels featuring women lawyers over a century

Legacy, by Catherine Yass, hangs in the Supreme Court and celebrates one hundred years of women in law.

The Supreme Court.

Every now and again, a society has to have a word with itself about something. Most social changes happen quite organically without a need for this kind of self-conscious dialogue. Hat-wearing in public was almost ubiquitous, for example, until about the middle of the twentieth century, when it simply stopped. No major debate happened about this - the hat simply sidled out of fashion. Western society just sort of internally worked out that the absence of a hat was not improper.

Whether or not gender is something real is not like whether it is polite to wear a hat. It requires a very hard conversation - one which pushes on some of the most fundamental differences people can have about politics, the world, and perhaps things even bigger than that. Whether one agrees with it or not, yesterday was a significant development in that very public conversation: the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled that the Equality Act is predicated on a classic gender ontology (i.e. the ‘realness’ of male and female).

What is at stake here? For some, the expansion of categories like ‘man’ and ‘woman’ to those who have undergone a clinical transition, and those who have an official certificate legally recognising their self-identified gender, is a crucial bellwether of our commitment to equality and freedom. They cite the rates of depression and suicide in this demographic, where an imposed gender causes deep distress.

Opponents of this move (like J. K. Rowling, who will be celebrating right now, no doubt) cite the dangers that de-anchoring gender from biological markers, like chromosomes or reproductive organs, will have. The justification of single-sex spaces is at least partially balanced on the idea that men and women are different, and separation of them is key for our sense of dignity or safety.

But both sides agree that we need copper-bottoms for our terms. All humans want to feel like our words are not empty gestures. Biological sex realists want to hold out for fundamentals which can be observed scientifically. This tallies with lots of observable features, history, and culture - but those who hold out for a definition of gender rooted in self-identification are not wrong to point out that overly medicalised definitions will struggle to divide all of the data without remainder. There are genuine cases of intersex people, for example.

What does a Christian like me think? Someone who is tied to what the Church has historically taught might look to the New Testament, where Jesus, for example, teaches that ‘male and female’ is a good, given aspect of our reality by God. That much might be consoling about the court’s decision. But a Christian may also feel a little cold about conceding the whole mystery of gender to brute biological fact. Surely there is something about being a woman or a man that is more than merely possession of certain physical features, as gender-critical activists claim?

St Paul, in one of his New Testament letters, says that men and women are an expression of something even more fundamental than chromosomes: “I speak of Christ and the Church”. But this does not make our genders into shadowy symbols. Rather, it says our gender difference is more real for pointing at is something beyond the physical. It is rooted in the most real thing a Christian knows: that God reconciles the world to himself through Jesus as if it was a cosmic marriage. On this view, maleness and femaleness is not a tick-list of attributes, but a goal at which we are all striving. It will require humility, mutual service, and love.

Society will keep on having its conversation about what exactly men and women are. But if it is to make sense of what things are really like, it may have to keep digging yet.

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