Sectarian Hatred in Football and Religion

If mankind has a spiritual dimension it is very much an earthly one. Sure we have always stared up into the sky and pondered the big questions, and for those of a superstitious disposition, gods and religions are quickly summoned. For the more rational amongst us, a never-ending quest for scientific understanding is our form of spirituality an ongoing endeavour to deconstruct the universe and our puny place within it. Down here on earth, our human spirituality is occasionally expressed by an empathy with those less fortunate than ourselves, an urge to share our own scarce resources, and a vague sense of belonging to a human collective.

But for the most part, we humans rarely transcended our tribal state, perpetually fearing ‘the other’ and going to war at the first pretext. At this primitive stage of our social development we just can’t seem to help ourselves.

Football and religion are two arenas where tribalism has long held sway and in the case of Scottish society, the two arenas merge into a grotesquely spiteful cocktail of bigotry, hatred and violence. By and large, European society eventually tired of the blood- letting in the years following the Protestant Reformation. The emerging capitalist class finally put an end to it. Bad for business! (The world’s Muslim leaders have yet to learn the lesson. Shia, Sunni and Wahabi attack each with such ferocity that their much heralded new global Caliphate is unlikely ever to see the light of day.) But in a few British outposts the tribalism between Catholic and Protestant goes on and on, unrestrained to this day.

Of course, underlying this ancient tribalism is an economic sore that has been festering away for centuries. The Protestant working class were given marginally better access to the socio economic cake, and their Catholic counterparts were reduced to second class citizens. It was a classic British divide-and-rule tactic that was successfully used throughout the empire, the ramifications of which are still being felt today. The British colonial statelet of Northern Ireland was the worst case scenario where loyalist thugs used any amount of fascist violence in an attempt to preserve their privileged status. After decades of civil war during which the Irish Republicans legitimately armed themselves in self defence, things have reached an uneasy stalemate, yet still there are separate walled communities with separate schools and separate cultures. The tribalism has not gone away.

In Scotland too the old resentments linger on with the ‘Old Firm’ Celtic-Rangers football contests being a regular flashpoint. It’s bubbled up again, this time with parcel bombs, hate mail and street violence being directed at prominent Celtic supporters including their manager. And it won’t go away. Not until the social and economic inequalities have been addressed and the communities have been fully integrated will the old rivalries fade, as they have in England, where the community divisions are no longer based on religious affiliation but simply on that of class.

But the English authorities have no reason to be complacent. The headlong rush, by successive governments, into funding religious schools will, in the medium and long term, exacerbate community tensions to such an extent that the tensions and violence endemic in Glasgow and Belfast could become common fare in all British cities. Only this time it will be Muslim families as the second class citizens and at the receiving end of a bigoted white lumpen proletarian backlash. It sounds like an Enoch Powell ‘rivers of blood’ scenario but it need not happen. Integration begins in the school playground and it is here that the Labour opposition must herald a return to the comprehensive school ideal. But they won’t. As Trevor Phillips warned, we will, with the present policies, sleep-walk into a segregated Britain.

David Goldblatt, writing in The Guardian 21/4/11 draws some bizarre conclusions from the tribalism regularly emanating from the football terraces. Goldblatt writes:

Solidarity and identity are most effectively created under conditions of threat, in symbolic and practical opposition to others. Football’s competitive quality, physicality and legions of away fans provides this in spades. The reflex action of many is to call for the removal of politics from football; an operation likely to kill the patient. For those already locked into sectarian conflicts, racist politics or authoritarian manipulation, football offers enormous potential for recruitment and demagogy. For those who want to promote a politics of universalism, fraternity and equality, its canvas is equally attractive. To pursue the latter, we must accept the possibility and threat of the former.

For Goldblatt, there seems a certain inevitability about the narrow tribalism associated with football. This inevitability I do not accept. Get to the economic core of the tribalism and the divisions start to disintegrate. Competition for scarce resources is invariably at the heart of any community friction, no less in British cities than elsewhere. Address that scarcity and a more rational world emerges.

Be the first to comment on "Sectarian Hatred in Football and Religion"

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published.


*