Among the Thugs Again: When It Goes Off

"You see, what is does is this: it gives violence a purpose. It makes us somebody. Because we're not doing it for ourselves. We're doing it for something greater-for us. The violence is for the lads"

Mark, resident Manchester United supporter, Among the Thugs

The reasons why devotion, especially religious devotion, turns, curdles, into violence are always rooted in some kind of structure, logic, and coherence. The practitioners of this violence can most always explain their propensities with some kind of link, some kind of thread, back to the root and heart of what they are devoted to and to why they are devoted to such a thing, whether it's a teaching of faith, their family, their community, their tribe, their nation, or some combination of all of these things. 

Mark Juergensmeyer, in his erudite and prophetic 2000 tome Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, writes that "it takes a community of support and, in many cases, a large organizational network for an act of terrorism to succeed. It also requires an enormous amount of moral presumption for the perpetrators of these acts to justify the destruction of property on a massive scale or to condone a brutal attack on another life, especially the life of someone one scarcely knows...And it requires a great deal of internal conviction, social acknowledgment, and the stamp of approval from a legitimizing ideology or authority one respects."

The blokes of English Football Saturday in Bill Buford's Among the Thugs certainly had built what seemed to be a fully functioning, hierarchical, multi-tiered Church and Community behind their devotion to Manchester United or West Ham or Millwall. The old standing-room terraces in their stadiums and dens was where the supporters offered their worship, crushed against each other, moving in what Buford described as a constant motion of shove and counter shove. The firms were the hierarchies the supporters adhered to, with the most proven in terms of their reputation for violence and bling, like fancy track suits, jewelry, and Rolls Royces, acquired from related and un-related criminal enterprising, at the head of the firm.

The violence and bling trickled down in the manner of the jib, in which the supporters, by the sheer quantity of their marauding, would find and take and steal anything they could on Football Saturday, from places in the terrace without having tickets, to handfuls of shoplifted bacon-flavoured potato crisps and lagers, and free stowaway passage on planes, buses, and trains all over England and even into Europe. 

The jib, which in many ways was the mechanism of the supporters' devotion, was based on the principle, Buford noted, that "everyone-including the police-is powerless against a large number of people who have decided not to obey any rules. Or put another way: with numbers there are no laws."

Buford noted that many of the supporters were tattooed, but not entirely quite like what Pete Townshend once wrote about. Marking their bodies with what Buford describes as "totemic pledges of permanence", such as great hellscapes with Man U Red Devils devouring famous players of other clubs in eternal flame, or simply with the names of club superstars like Bryan Robson running across the entire forehead, the devotion of these blokes was a matter of needle and blood. 

All in all, the rituals of Football Saturday were all well and structured. Everyone was there for the match and the drink and the laugh, and even if the blokes were a little rowdy at times, especially when they traveled to the foreigner's place, as Buford did with a number of Manchester United supporters to a 1984 Cup-Winners Cup match against Juventus in Turin, they claimed again that they meant well. That they most indeed not hooligans. 

The rudeness of the supporters, as noted by Buford, "was their vitality, and these people were very rude; they were committed to rudeness, as though it was their moral banner." 

They were boisterous, kleptomanic, and oafish because their devotion to their club was so much a part of their very identity, and their devotion was so strong, that anything which was counter to that devotion, like Juventus, or the people of Turin, whether these people were Juventus supporters or not, or anyone in the way of the cut of their jib, deserved their rudeness, simply because they were not a member of the Church.

***

Yet rudeness is one thing and brutal, rib-cracking, skull-crushing violence is another. The difference is what turns the supporters from blokes into thugs. The difference is when it goes off. 

Following the match in Turin, which the home-side Juventus won 2-1, to clinch a berth in the Cup-Winners Cup Final, where they beat FC Porto, 2-1, to win the Cup, in case you're keeping track of such things, the Man U supporters, with exquisitely disturbing precision and intent, reflecting and expressing the structure of their Church, "like some giant, strangely coordinated insect", laid waste to the people and places of Turin. Buford noted the sudden, startling change: "If anyone here was drunk, he was not acting as if he was. Everyone was purposeful and precise, and there was a strong quality of aggression about them, like some kind of animal scent. Nobody was saying a word."

It goes off. The threshold is crossed. The blokes encounter the Other. The blokes become thugs. They batter merchandise sellers, bashing heads repeatedly against the merchandise table. Shop windows, buses, and cars are assaulted by maniacs wielding giant blocks of concrete they shouldn't be able to carry aloft in more normal, more sober circumstances. They swarm upon local lads hopelessly caught in the mob, beaten to a pulp by six or seven supporters at a time, Yes, some of these local lads are Juventus' own firm, there to protect their turf, but many, all too many, are not. It is, by any definition, a riot. It is, by most definitions, terrorism.

Most disturbing is an encounter with a family caught in the mob of thugs. The husband, in a panic, is somehow able to get his wife and children in their car before he is set upon, struck across the face by a metal bar. Buford horrifically wonders "Why him?...What had he done except make himself conspicuous by trying to get his family out of the way?...The others followed, running on top of the man on the ground, sometimes slowing down to kick him-the head, the spine, the ass, the ribs, anywhere."

As much as there is a consistent consistency to the presence of coherence and reason within the phenomenon and practice of religious violence, to the ways and means devotion curdles into violence, there is always something profoundly incoherent and irrational to it as well. The mystery of religious violence which tortures us stands against the rational structures and ideologies which support it. The rationality of the structures and ideologies behind religious violence, which can be so easily identified when we widen our contextual lenses, only make the mystery of the irrationality deeper. 

We can only go so far in our study, our understanding, our attempts at sympathy. There is something so dark in human nature which emerges in this mysterious space which defies our intellect and stains our heart and soul. What causes someone who is so devoted to a cause, a club, a community, a deity of any sort, to decide the Other, whether or not this Other is a legitimate threat to the devotee's safety and well-being, must be violently attacked, even to the point of murder, of slaughter?

By this point in Buford's immersion, he clearly understands the structure of Football Saturday and the devotees of the clubs. He understands, and experiences, their rudeness. But when it goes off, when their devotion turns into violence, when they become thugs, the structure of it all becomes a horrific, unfathomable mystery. What is most mysterious of all, to Buford, was the emotional reactions of the thugs to the violence they were committing.

Buford writes:

There was an intense energy about it; it was impossible not to feel some of the thrill. Somebody near me said that he was happy. He said that he was very, very happy, that he could not remember ever being so happy...here was someone who believed that, at this precise moment, following a street scuffle, he had succeeded in capturing one of life's most elusive qualities.

Even when they are back in Manchester, far away from the animal scent of that evening in Turin, the supporters, even some of the most obviously successful ones, those with jobs and pensions and wives and kids (and Buford will clearly point out later in the book that the kind of economic depression which otherwise logically explains the phenomenon and practice of religious violence is not widely present with these highly privileged young English men) continue to express that their violence is a kind of emotional and spiritual necessity, that the violence is a part of their inherent being which can not not be expressed. 

Buford meets a Keith Richards look-alike who quite logically insists:

The violence, we've all got it in us. It just needs a cause. It needs an acceptable way of coming out. And it doesn't matter what it is. But something. It's almost an excuse. But it has to come out. Everyone's got it in them.

We go back to the lead quote, from Mark, one of those supporters with the job and the pension and the wife and the kid. For him, even for him, the violence "makes us somebody. Because we're not doing it for ourselves. We're doing it for something greater-for us. The violence is for the lads." There is nothing inherently wrong with the kind of devotion that brings atomized individuals together for a common cause and purpose, something "greater" than mere individualism. There is something inherently spiritual in such common cause. Yet there is something deeply wrong when the kind of violence the thugs commit is needed to justify and keep the devotion together, to make it stronger, to make it something real and meaningful. There is nothing spiritual about that (but is it still religious?)

It makes perfect sense, yet it is so, so disturbingly macabre, senseless, and mysterious. The violence and the devotion of the thugs is one-to-one, hand-in-hand. It makes perfect sense to the bloke why he becomes a thug. To those of us observing the thug, studying the thug, we are horrified, perhaps because we know these tendencies are not ultimately foreign to our own experience and nature. Buford, again recalling an encounter with one of the materially successful supporters, writes that "he was rational and fluent, and had given much thought to the problems he was discussing, although he had not thought about the implications of the thing-that this was socially deviant conduct of the highest order...I don't think he understood the implications; I don't think he would have acknowledged them as valid."

The deeper Buford gets into the crowd of the thugs, the more clear and the less clear it becomes. In our next blog, we will examine Buford looking at the nature of the crowd itself, the phenomenon of the crowd, when the morals and ethics and boundaries that we, as civilized individual citizens, hold dear and claimed that our ancestors fought and died for, disappear under the influence of that mysterious compulsion which turns sanity into insanity, bonds into bones breaking, devotion into violence. 

Among the Thugs Again: The Nasty Ghost of Hooliganism

All the stories have been told

Of kings and days of old

But there's no England now

All the wars that were won and lost

Somehow don't seem to matter very much anymore

All the lies we were told

All the lies of the people running around

They're castles have burned

Now I see change

But inside we're the same as we ever were

The Kinks, "Living on a Thin Line"

Bill Buford's Among the Thugs is the most remarkable book I have ever read. The front cover features a picture of one of these "thugs", a skinheaded English bloke half-lidded smoking a cigarette whose visage gives off the impression of a personality barely connected to the reality around him, yet who also gives the impression that he's about three seconds away from punching your nose into your brain-stem. Below this face is the novelist John Gregory Dunne's very apt description of the experience of reading this book: "A grotesque, horrifying, repellant, and gorgeous book; A Clockwork Orange come to life."

Thugs marks a moment in time, but like any moment in time, that moment's tentacles connect irrevocably to our present moment and how our present moment is warped by our preoccupations of the past and our fears and hopes for the future. Among the Thugs is Buford's deep dive as a American journalist into the horrifying and fascinating phenomenon of English football hooliganism. David Rudin, in his review of Thugs in Howler Magazine, marking the 25th anniversary of the book's publication, writes that "Buford's account of the thugs he moved with are by turns amazing, repugnant, stunning, horrid, and exhilarating. In the same way the 'crowd violence was their drug,' Buford's account gave me a fix. The same passages turn me on and make me want to turn away."

I'm not sure what it says about me that I'm now into my third reading of this hell-scape tome. But there is a tremendous relevance to Thugs in our present moment. The phenomenon of football hooliganism does indeed seem, at least at the highest echelons of European football, to be a gruesome relic of the past. For those of us, so many of us, who have been part of the great emergence of football in America over the last couple of years, we are learning so much, being exposed finally to the greatest sport the human being has produced. We are experiencing fully, finally, since now the "beautiful game" is all over our tele's and streams, the religious experience of being a football fan. Hooliganism never enters into our vision in the slick, mannered, utterly professional and global presentation of the Premier League. So many of us learn about the mechanics and intricacies of football by playing FIFA and Football Manager and never even think about the hooligans and thugs who once threatened the very emergence of football which now blesses us. 

Yet the thug on the cover of Thugs has not completely disappeared. Yes, the corporatization and globalization of the game have moved us far away from the disasters at Heysel Stadium in 1985 and the stampede/crush at Hillsborough in 1989 (ESPN's 30 for 30 doc is Hillsborough is essential viewing to understand this moment in time-there are images you must see but that you never want to see again). But the menace of violence surrounding the game of football remains present like a nasty ghost. The violence at this summer's UEFA Championship tournament in France was intense enough that the English and Russian national teams were threatened with expulsion. What is even more pertinent to Thugs' ongoing relevance was the recent Brexit. As Buford makes clear throughout the book, the phenomenon of the thug was/is rooted in people who feel unmoored, discarded, and disconnected from the splendors and wonders of the corporatization and globalization of society. 

The thug is threatened by the Other. The Other is what inspires the thug to act like a thug, to create a whole religion of thuggery. Buford writes:

"The rest of the world is a big place, and its essential inhabitant is the stranger. The supporters did not like the stranger...And there was no stranger more strange, and therefore no stranger more detestable, than the foreigner...The problem with foreigners was this: they were incomplete...foreigners had never quite climbed all the way up the evolutionary ladder; there was a little less of the foreigner, especially foreigners of a dark complexion..."

Watching videos coming out of the UK since the Brexit, videos in which modern-day thugs berate people of color on public buses, telling them to "get back to Africa!", hearing that hate crimes have surged 42% in England and Wales since the Brexit, understanding that a "frenzy of hatred" not only fueled the Brexit but is being fueled by the Brexit, we watch the visage of the thug on the cover of Thugs step out and come alive again. We must understand the thug if we are to understand the complexity of the rise of far-right/neo-fascist populism in Europe and in America. To understand the thug we have to attempt to do what Buford did: to enter into the world of the thug, the everyday life of the thug, to even have compassion for the thug and to hear his grievances at being left behind by forces beyond his control, forces which can be considered the real enemy.

Among the Thugs is also a deeply religious book, for it reveals to us what happens when devotion becomes the motivation and mechanism of violence. Devotion curdling into violence is a virus which continues to infect our bodies of faith. With this understanding of Thugs ongoing and increased relevance for our social body infected by the presence of visceral, murderous hatred, we will explore, through a series of upcoming blogs, how Thugs helps us to understand why, when, and how devotion becomes violence. 

Sports Ecstasy as Religious Ecstasy

In case you're not sure what about talking about. Go Iceland!

The Boy Who Lived for Football and Died For Hate

Reprinting Wright Thompson's compelling piece on ESPN FC on Abou Omar Brams, teenage football devotee turned ISIS foot-soldier, and the mysterious horror of the turn from devotion to fanaticism.

MOLENBEEK, Belgium -- Not long ago, I met a grieving mother so she could tell me about her dead terrorist son. This can be a strange job sometimes, and few moments have been stranger than sitting on a quiet Sunday morning, a little rain falling outside, talking to Geraldine Henneghien. The neighborhood around us, known in Europe as the breeding ground for radical Islam, looked quiet and even quaint.

Abou Omar Brams had curly hair. He hung a poster of New York City on his wall, dreaming of going there one day. He loved football, both playing and watching, and his email address had French star Thierry Henry's name in it. Four years ago, as silly as it seems now, she remembers being angry and worried during the European Championship, because all he did was watch games, all day for a month, when he should have been studying for his exams. She banned him from the television and then caught him upstairs in his room, following the games online

The thing he loved most was FC Barcelona

The family went on vacation about five years ago to the French town of Perpignan, in the Pyrenees near the Spanish border, and Brams talked her into driving him two hours to visit Camp Nou, Barcelona's stadium. They took the tour, walked through the museum and then went a little crazy in the gift shop. She bought him a bedspread, a scarf and a jersey. "The real shirt in the stadium," she says. "It was very expensive but I said, 'OK, I will buy it.'"

The bedspread is still on the bed in his room and the jersey is in his closet. She hasn't touched a thing. Even now, with him dead more than a year, she still stops and checks a score when she sees Barcelona is playing.

"When they win, I say, 'Oh, he will be happy,'" she says.

That's as close as she can get to a prayer over his grave; she never saw his body or even a photo of it. He died in Syria, where he went to join Al Qaeda, and likely ISIS, after being radicalized by an imam in their town. Brams had been friends with the man's son, who told him it was his duty to fight for other Muslims. As parents in some American neighborhoods worry about gang leaders, parents in Molenbeek worry about radical imams. The Belgian government, as of January, says 470 of its citizens have tried to join the war in Syria.

In the background picture on Brams' Twitter account -- the last tweet came two days before he died -- he's smiling on what looks a beach with three other boys. They look like kids, grinning in mismatched camo gear, but they're not. Two people to the right is Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the mastermind of the Paris attacks, which included gunning down trapped civilians in a concert hall. These aren't wayward teenagers who stole a car; they are cowards and killers, and they grew up in the same European countries they wanted to destroy.

One of them grew up under Geraldine's roof.

Four years ago, he was a normal teenager, and she's trying to figure out how that boy who followed every second of the Euros became a monster. (A monster to other people; she still sees him as a good boy led astray.) But figuring out how all this happened, and reliving every missed opportunity to stop it, will be her struggle for the rest of her life.

It started the summer he turned 18, in 2013. He wanted to find a summer job, so he could make some money, but when he'd apply, he'd get asked about his Moroccan name. (His mother was born in Belgium, and his father, a Belgian citizen for 20 years, was born in Morocco.) That's where it began, with something as small as looking for a way to make some extra cash. In all the interviews, he got asked about his background and nobody ever called him back. By the end of the summer, already angsty like nearly every 18-year-old, he talked to his mother.

"I have no place," he said to her. "When I am in Belgium, they say I am Moroccan. When I am in Morocco, they say I am Belgian. Where is my place?"

By September, his parents noticed he started to pray more, which pleased them at first. What parents don't want their child exploring their faith? They didn't know to look for signs that radical recruiters were influencing their son. Later, she'd see the literature used to lure teenage boys to ISIS: talking about helping create a new country, where they belonged and were important. Brams started waking up early for the predawn prayer and still they didn't sense anything amiss, until November when he began talking about wanting to go help the Syrian people. "For a young boy who is thinking, 'I have no future,'" she says, "it's very easy to go there. We tried to talk to him a lot of times. We spent a lot of time forbidding him."

Brams and his father started arguing about the Quran, and on Jan. 12, 2014, his dad pushed back on his son's interpretation of the book. Geraldine says: "His father was saying, 'You may not explain my religion. I'm Muslim, but I'm old so I have experience. You have no experience.'"
That's the last time they saw their son.

He told them he was going to Syria with or without their blessing. They went to the police and told them the whole story, hoping to have his passport blocked. She says the local cops told her they'd take care of it but they didn't. Two weeks later, Brams got on a plane and left for Syria. (The police, however, are now investigating her for aiding terrorists, because she gave money to a woman who married her son in Syria.)

She wishes now she'd have known the police couldn't help.

"I would have gone to the airport to block him myself," she says.

They communicated while he was gone, over the internet and through phone calls. Once he asked her to buy him a ticket out of Syria, and she told him she'd pay anything it took. He said he'd call back with details in two hours, and she now suspects that ISIS leaders were listening to all of the calls, because when she and her son got back on the phone he said, "I will stay here with the brothers."

His tone with her always depended on whether he was alone.

"I received two different kinds of conversation with my son," she says. "One was a son with his mother. Very kind. 'How are you?' The other was, 'You must come here. You may not go out in Belgium with men. You must come here to live in a Muslim state.'"

ISIS started calling itself that in June of 2014, although it had existed under different names since 1999 and broke away from Al Qaeda in February 2014, at the same moment Brams was arriving in Syria. Geraldine never found out for sure if her son joined the group, although the photos in his Twitter feed indicate that he almost certainly did.

"Are you in ISIS?" she asked him once.

"You must not know," he replied. "I am here and I am working."

The day before he died, they talked. He told her he wouldn't call for a week.

"I must go to work," he said.

Two days later, she received a text message from a number she didn't recognize.

"You must be proud of your son," the man wrote. "He was a good guy. He was loved by everybody. He was a lion."

That's how she found out, and even though she knew the answer, she asked the question anyway.

"Your son is dead," the man replied, explaining Brams had been killed while defending an airport in Syria, shot in the face.

"Where is he buried?" she asked.

"Just near the airport," the man replied.

That was a year and a half ago. She honors him with an association she helps run, joining together other parents whose children have gone to Syria. They work with psychologists to help the moms and dads use the right language in urging their children to return, so the kids don't push them away. Through the association, she now goes to schools and tries to get to the young men before the recruiters do it first. One day, she wants to go to Syria and see where her son died, then she wants to find his body and bring it home.

For now, she's left with her work and many regrets.

"If I knew, I would speak with him more," she says, "and I would help him to understand it's possible to live here."

She breaks down for the first time and starts to cry.

"I would speak with him more and more," she says.

---

After the interview, I had a train to catch. Geraldine insisted on taking me, so she drove across town, an especially nice gesture since she was going straight from the interview to tutor a young person in math. I meant to write this story on that train, two weeks ago, but I didn't. Before diving into the notes and recorded interview, I checked my phone for the first time that day, reading the overnight news from home.

That's when I learned about Orlando.

I didn't write the story then because I didn't want to say in public what I felt viscerally in that moment: A part of me was glad Geraldine's son was dead. He'd died before he could come back to Europe, like his friend on his Twitter page, to kill someone for wanting to listen to a band, or eat Cambodian food, or just sit in a wicker chair and drink a glass of wine with friends. His death, and her pain, seemed a small price to pay. That thought troubled me these past couple of weeks, surrounded by a French security apparatus, with wide avenues sealed off and armed soldiers patrolling leafy neighborhoods, millions of dollars and thousands of people looking for one person in a crowd. It's not scary here, but there is a bit of the garrison mentality that will be the new normal in Paris, and maybe around the world. I'm not glad Geraldine suffered, although the world is probably better off without her son. He knew the planner of the attacks in Paris. Did he also know the people who killed 36 on Tuesday in Istanbul? I've been in that airport four times in the past six weeks. I got lucky I guess. There's nothing to do really but wait for the next news alert about another shooting or bombing somewhere in the world, and try to manage the gnawing fear that something beyond our control has been unleashed.

A senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine, Wright Thompson is a native of Clarksdale, Mississippi.

The "Wahhh!", the Chant, and the Club: Football as Religious Experience

For all the sturm-und-drang and hands to the heavens about the decline and downfall of religion in the 21st Century, I'm here to say everything is quite okay, especially if you're a devoted Football (Soccer) fan, for Football provides some of the most profound religious emotion and experience you can find in the world today.

You can experience this ecstasy, you can feel it in the marrow of your bones, in the beat of the heart, in that incredible moment when, incredibly, amazingly, against pretty stiff odds, a GOL is scored, and the crowd all goes WAHHHH!! at once. 

(Folks of certain persuasions and allegiances will have to forgive the preponderance of Cristiano Ronaldo and Real Madrid. Ronaldo is a very attractive man-I call him "Sexy"-and the fans at the Santiago Bernabeu do the best WAHHH! after a GOL)

Mancunians of a certain "Blue Moon" persuasion know the spiritual agony and ecstasy of Football all too well. Having suffered for decades without barely a trophy or championship, having watched their beloved City fall down into the middling tiers of the English Football League, they found themselves on the final day of the 2012 Premier League season simply needing a win against lowly Queens Park Rangers to win their first championship in 44 years.

Being City, things did not go quite as planned, and you need this bit of context when watching the full video below. Watch especially the anguish of the City supporters, until 5:34 of the video, when you can understand and feel Football as Religious Experience.

The shots of the supporters after Sergio Aguero's miracle GOL are the best. There is this astounding emotional release which is so visceral, like a gush of gale wind, that you can practically taste the tears of joy and amazement. Every time I watch this video tears comes to my eyes without fail (I joke with a dear friend that sports is the only thing that actually makes me cry-more on that later). This was the moment that made me fall in love with Football. Even though I knew little of the angst of being a City supporter at the time, I understood how extraordinary this moment was. I could feel it through the screen and across the ocean. I jumped out of my seat and scared the shite out of my neighbor with my cries of joy (not the first or last time I will do that).

And it's just that: it's extraordinary! Here is a moment of sport, of "footy" as they call it in the Queen's land, which lifts these people, as individuals and as a community, into a mutual rush of emotion, feeling, and expression which is beyond all that is pale and mundane. If religion is anything, it is those experiences which draw us beyond ourselves, beyond our selfish little horrible spaces, into the kind of communal ecstatic connection which belongs to everyone and which is due to everyone. 

Participating in the experience of Football is a sensual feast. The chants that resound around the grounds resemble a kind of mantra altering the consciousness of the team's supporters, and hopefully altering the consciousness of the team's players so that they perform better. A traditional definition of mantra from Indic religious traditions is a chant or prayer which "delivers the mind." The mind is delivered from its everyday, obsessive, unhealthy, selfish compulsions towards patterns which are more integrated, more compassionate, and more connected to the common good of all living beings. 

The chants of the football fan can certainly uplift the fan into communion with their fellows which breaks down common barriers, but like all-too many seemingly religious exhortations, it can also be a prescription for a dangerous kind of fanaticism. The phenomenon of hooliganism, expertly detailed in Bill Buford's book Among the Thugs, is something that Football has not entirely recovered from. The ways that the constructive and destructive sides of Football and sports devotion resemble the constructive and destructive sides of religious devotion is something I hope we can explore more together in our Sports Theology blog.

The grand cathedrals of modern football and modern sports are in many ways the repositories of deep emotional experience that the grand religious cathedrals of yore once primarily invoked and contained for society. This also reflects the constructive and destructive side of religious experience. Within our grand modern-day sports stadiums we can find a kind of release from our everyday concerns, and a connection to our community which can make our life more meaningful. However, these stadiums, and the economic principles they represent and express, are also a tremendous drain on community resources which can and must be used to care for the most vulnerable members of the community. These kinds of conflicts and paradoxes, so prevalent in their own similar ways in religious communities, I also hope we can explore together through this our Sports Theology blog. 

There are a lot of ways to define religion, and to argue for Football or Sports as Religious Experience isn't particularly new or novel, or even popular. Religious theorist Martin Riesebrodt, in his compelling tome The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion, laments that:  

When soccer games are seen as religious phenomena and the recitation of Buddhist sutras is not, something has obviously gone wrong.

I read this recently as I was beginning to consider the idea of Sports Theology more seriously, spurred on by encouragement from friends and colleagues who wouldn't let me treat the idea as a half-joke. To be honest I have a very distinct disagreement and kind of disgust with Riesebrodt's statement. We can understand his sentiment as quite a bit traditional and/or fuddy-duddy. I want this blog to start a conversation and argument with sentiments like Riesebrodt's, sentiments which are suspicious of the relationship between religion and popular culture. The theory and practice of religion, and how this theory and practice is defined, is undergoing profound change in relation to centuries of preceding thought and practices largely confined and prioritized within Western, Christo-centric frameworks. But religion as our grandparents knew it, even as we knew it when we were younger, isn't simply the same bells and whistles anymore. 

What we need and desire and express in relation to religious knowledge and experience is always contextual and subjective, even as it connects us to what we feel and know is the objective connecting foundation, source, and thread within all aspects of our mutual reality, a foundation, source, and thread we call by many, many Names. "Spiritual But Not Religious" folks, also known as the "Nones", are on to something when they refuse to define or limit their spiritual/religious experience to what has come before. We may find their quest rather amorphous and flighty, and trust me there are more than a few religious scholars of Riesebrodt's generation who think this way, but these critiques, valid or not, do not obscure the nature of the phenomenon, of the reality of these concrete persons, who in their own faith journey, who are putting into practice the cutting-edge of the theory and practice of religion.

Understanding religion as something more fresh and fluid that what has come before opens the door and creates a path for arguing for Football as Religious Experience and for the concept of Sports Theology in general. If I am to make a claim and stake a space within the spectrum of the theory of religion, I would say religion and spirituality are those experiences, practices, collections of wisdom, and existential relations between living beings and life processes which draw us beyond toxic self-absorption. Psychotherapists may call this the id, Christians may identify it as pride, and many Hindus call it the ahankara, or the illusioned self. Religious experience draws us beyond this caged space of destructive self-absorption towards our communal, collective destiny of reciprocation and relationship with all living beings and with the divine foundation, source, and thread of our reality.

So am I completely off base arguing that Football and sports in general can be a kind of religious experience, and can have theological import i.e that it can give us experiential knowledge of the divine foundation, source, and thread of our mutual reality? This is what I hope we will explore together here in this Sports Theology blog. I think there is plenty of evidence that Football, and sports in general, can draw us beyond the pale,  the ordinary and the rotten selfishness we abhor in ourselves and in others in ways that not only resemble religion, but which may actually be religious themselves (especially when the Football is miraculous, as in Leicester City's rise to the 2016 Premier League title from 5000-1 odds to win it at the start of the year. Wright S. Thompson has a great article on how this miracle is compelling the people of Leicester to recover their sense of community).

Whether you scoff or smile at the idea that Football, and sports, can be Religious Experience, I hope you will add your voice to this discussion to explore the extraordinary meaning and experience of sports and how this meaning can intersect with the extraordinary meaning and experience of religion.