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.

Essay

America

Comment

Leading

Politics

31 October 2024

6 min read

Democracy, hypocrisy and us

A deep dive into the pitfalls of political vision and our response to them.

Josh Richards

Josh is a curate in London, and is completing a PhD in theology.

Donald Trump holds his arms out to his side while speaking.

Trump addresses a faith leader event.

x/realdonaldtrump.

Coverage of the Republican candidate for Vice-President, J.D. Vance can't help but return again and again to his Christian intellectual influences. Whether it's an interview with Rod Dreher or an analysis of Patrick Deneen and other 'New Right' thinkers, many US political journalists are having to give their readers a crash course in some of the most controversial ideas in contemporary theology. One recent Politico article stands out because it didn't just introduce an unsuspecting audience of political obsessives to an obscure theologian, it also told them (us) about contradictory ways one might read said obscure theologian. And yet these contradictions force us to confront a difficulty facing anyone engaged in democratic debate.

In the article , Ian Ward sought to explore the impact of Rene Girard's scapegoat mechanism on Vance. In doing so, Ward underlines the importance of Girard's ideas in the intellectual circles around J.D. Vance and his mentor, Peter Thiel.

Girard, a French academic who died in 2015, is remembered foremost for his analysis of the relation between desire and conflict. Girard proposes that desire is ‘memetic, that is to say, it mimics; I want what I see that others want. This naturally leads to conflict, a conflict that can only be resolved by a scapegoat. Identifying a scapegoat, an out-group, is a force powerful enough to create a sense of solidarity between those would otherwise be in conflict over shared desires.

The Politico take considered how Vance's reading of Girard might relate to Vance's defence of his running mate's false suggestion that Haitian immigrants are eating their neighbour's pets in Springfield, Ohio. It went as far to suggest that—rather than a rejection of Girard's analysis— Vance could be understood to be applying a pragmatic reading of Girard. Ward writes:

Though Girard never said so outright, some of his interpreters have argued that Girard’s idea of the Christian ethic — which in theory offers an alternative to ritualistic violence as a basis for social cohesion — cannot in practice serve as the basis for a large, complex and modern society.

Scapegoating is inevitable, deploy it to your advantage. We cannot know how exactly this or any reading of Rene Girard factors into his political tactics. What we can know is that Vance's public fascination with big ideas opens him up to a charge upon which a healthy democracy depends: hypocrisy.

In contrast, there is often a surprising transparency to Trump's appeals to self-interest, Addressing a audience in July, Trump declared:

Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.

As much as Vance and others try to change this, there is little ideological content, no substance behind ‘Make America Great Again’ insofar as Trump tells it. It is politics at its most transactional and what Trump offer his supporters, beautiful or otherwise, is so often a scapegoat. Trump tends to be pretty open about this and, as ugly as this kind of politics is, there is a strange kind of honesty to it. But Vance is different. He has big ideas. And however weird you may think these ideas are, and however much tension there seems to be between his love of Rene Girard and his scapegoating of Haitian immigrants, democracy is better for that tension. Constructive democratic debate, in some sense, depends on hypocrisy. Without it, democracy would be nothing more than a negotiation around mere self-interest.

A politician with an ideological vision is one that can be held accountable. Keir Starmer's recent decision to pay back £6,000 worth of gifts is a case in point. Had he not sought to set himself as a contrast to the Boris Johnson of Partygate, the criticism of his accepting clothes and tickets would not have had the same bite.

Stumbling into politics haunted by a sense that things could be better will make us hypocrites on impact.

The first generations of Christians encountered a similar problem. The law they believed that they had received from God showed them a vision for the good life just as it revealed all the ways they fell short. As the early church leader Paul wrote: “through the Law comes the knowledge of sin.” We might add that through political ideology or aspiration comes the knowledge of political hypocrisy.

Had Vance never publicly explored Girard's theory, if he were only an opportunist more like Trump, we would have one less means by which to hold him to account. Every politician will be found lacking when judged by their public ideological aspirations. And the more ideological aspirations, the greater the charge of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy will always be found wherever we find people debating and aspiring to ideas more perfect than they are. I'm not defending any individual hypocrisy; the residents of Springfield, Ohio and newcomers across the US deserve so much better. Hypocrisy is always disappointing, but it is less disappointing than the alternatives: either a naked pursuit of self-interest or a naïve expectation of ideological purity.

The question for each of us in a democracy is how we live with hypocrisy, expecting it while still expecting more from those who wish to serve us in public office. And a moment's introspection reveals that it is a charge that confronts each of us also: the shaming gap between my aspirations for my life and the reality. To ask how we live with these hypocritical politicians is really to ask how we live with ourselves?

With that we return to Girard. He claimed that Jesus Christ willingly became a transparently innocent scapegoat and in doing so undermined the mechanism. In the Politico article, Vance is quoted as follows:

In Christ, we see our efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim for what they are: a moral failing, projected violently upon someone else. Christ is the scapegoat who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims.

The exacting logic of the crucifixion prevents us from scapegoating even the scapegoating politicians.

But Jesus’ death is more than an embodied social critique. In coming to us and dying in the person of Jesus, God showed his love for imperfect people struggling under the weight of perfect ideas. He came to give the home and safety we all desire, offered freely to hypocrites. The point of Christ's death is not, at least in the first instance, to inspire me to treat others better. It is God's unconditioned offer to the broken and hypocritical, as the broken and hypocritical, not as he'd rather we be.

Paul puts it like this: "God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Yes, God's grace is too dramatic, too strong not to provoke us and empower us to change, but his love comes to us before any change. It comes to us as we are, nursing our pitchforks and that self-righteous sense that it's all really someone else's fault.

Stumbling into politics haunted by a sense that things could be better will make us hypocrites on impact. We must not excuse this hypocrisy; we should hold ourselves and our leaders to account. And yet we can do so gratefully haunted and gratefully held by a God who came for hypocrites.