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.

Column

America

Comment

Politics

31 October 2024

4 min read

Is Trump a fascist?

Fascism is fashionable again, what sort of vigilance is needed to guard against it?

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A protester holds placards up in both hands. One reads: Trump is a fascist. The other: Repair the broken world

A protester outside a Trump rally.

dnyuz.com.

I was once called a fascist for saying that the only authority I recognised was God’s. Actually, it had the usual alliterative, adjectival expletive attached to “fascist” that was customary for those of us who received a leftist political education in the 1970s. Very Dave Spart.

Fascism is popular – or possibly populist – as an insult again. The epithet has been applied to Donald Trump in the final stages of the US presidential race. His former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, revealed that Trump had some emollient things to say about Adolf Hitler and retired US general Mark Milley has branded Trump “fascist to the core”.

Democrat presidential rival Kamala Harris endorsed their use of the F-word for Trump, in what must count as one of her more daring statements of the campaign.

And it’s not just evidence of Trump’s admiration for Hitler, historically the go-to evil icon for every anti-fascist. Trump likes tough-guy dictators and rulers. Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, President Erdogan of Turkey, China’s Xi Jinping have all received the Trump seal of approval.

That’s quite a list. What’s most worrying is that Trump has so many role models to choose from. Fascism seems fashionable again. Apart from trying to be nice and kind and not cruel to everybody in a Pollyanna kind of way, those of us of a non-combative religious faith are obliged to state quite why we do find this so worrying.

We’re in the territory here of the cruelty and savagery of the incompetent empty vessel.

Part of the answer to that is pragmatic. Fascist leaders are generally not supportive of their domestic religions, as they endeavour to build their own religious cults around themselves, though it has to be said that Hitler’s relationship with the Catholic Church was at best ambiguous, while Trump is quite reliant on the Christian Right in the US.

Another part of the answer attaches to my response to earthly authority as described at the top of this. It sounds like a cop-out and, in part, I accept that. It’s actually an opt-out, in that the Christian story doesn’t recognise worldly authority unless it serves its standards, rather than the other way around.

That’s why we’re feared by authoritarian political leaders – call them fascist if you will. By extension, the Christian faith isn’t politically populist, though it might be described as a popular movement. Our leadership model is among the people it serves, rather than from the front of them. That’s not a model that Trump or anyone he admires is likely to emulate any time soon.

It is what so confounded and ultimately threatened the political establishment in which it was founded. An itinerant preacher and miracle-worker emerges from the backwoods of a far-flung province of the Roman Empire – a fascist enterprise if ever there was one – to tell both it and its puppet state Judea that his and his insurgent followers’ authority comes not from this world. And the triumph of that claim is recorded in the subsequent two millennia of human history.

That’s not power to the people, nor really a power of the people, but a power of every person in a corporate unity. It is, if you like, the exact obverse of the Roman coin, the antithesis of the emperor and the antidote to every fascist leader that has ever followed and been followed.

I’m not at all sure that Trump is a fascist, as claimed. There’s a school of thought that he’s not bright enough, is too plain dumb, to join that rogues’ gallery. The most dangerous fascists of history, like Hitler, have a pitch-dark ideology that they pursue at all human cost to others and themselves. Trump has no apparent ideology other than the serving of his own vanities and insecurities.

That doesn’t make him undangerous, but it makes him a different kind of authoritarian from a true fascist. We’re in the territory here of the cruelty and savagery of the incompetent empty vessel. And we need to apply a different kind of vigilance from that of the authentic fascist. Because Trump is essentially a buffoon.

Idiotic or truly evil, ultimately the answer may not be to find electoral alternatives, but to measure them against what is transcendent and immutable in human nature.

The buffoonish authoritarian is a handmaid to fascism, but not the real thing. Perhaps every bit as destructive and oppressive of their people, but as an enabler of fascism rather than a principal. Like Benito Mussolini in Italy in the 1930s and Second World War, these are preening clowns, though of course not in the least bit funny.

It’s hardly on a par with the Reichstag fire in 1933, which Hitler manipulated for absolute power in Germany, but let’s not forget that Boris Johnson as prime minister attempted illicitly to prorogue parliament to get his way with Brexit in 2019. Like Trump, contempt for democracy and the “great man of history” personality cult tick a couple of boxes for fascism, but it doesn’t make them any less stupid.

Idiotic or truly evil, ultimately the answer may not be to find electoral alternatives, but to measure them against what is transcendent and immutable in human nature. And that brings me back to the first line of this piece.