Article

Creed

Sport

22 April 2024

5 min read

Killing Joy: VAR's search for objectivity is flawed

Why this Man United fan wishes his team had lost.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A TV screen shows a football match with a superimposed diagonal line dividing the pitch.

VAR draws the line.

BBC Sport.

I am a Manchester United fan. But I wish Coventry had won the FA Cup semi-final.

I have supported United alongside my hometown team, Bristol City, ever since the days of George Best, Bobby Charlton and Denis Law. (Bristol City never win anything so it’s nice to have a team that does win things occasionally – or at least used to).

In case you’ve had your head under a pillow over the weekend, or just avoid anything football-related on principle, Manchester United won an FA Cup semi-final replay on penalties by the skin of their teeth. 3-0 up and cruising after 70 minutes they somehow capitulated to allow Coventry, a team in the division below, to score three goals in the last 20 minutes. With virtually the last kick of extra time Coventry scored a fourth. Cue scenes of sheer unbridled ecstasy and abandon among the Coventry supporters.

What they experienced at that moment is what every sports fan longs for. Beating your intense rivals or mounting an astonishing comeback, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat - when it happens there is nothing like it. It is what United fans experienced when they beat Liverpool with a last-minute winner in the quarter final, or in the never-to-be-forgotten 1999 Champions League Final when they scored twice in injury time to beat Bayern Munich. Now it was Coventry’s turn.

But then the VAR (Video Assistant Referee), like a killjoy schoolteacher, telling the kids they should calm down and not get so excited, spoiled the party, by pointing out that in the build-up, a Coventry player’s foot was about three inches in front of the nearest body part of the last Man United defender, and so was offside. The offside rule exists to stop attackers gaining an advantage. Quite how those three inches gave the Coventry player an advantage is beyond me. Before VAR, the rule was that, if the attacker was basically level with the defender, it was deemed to be onside. Let’s face it, it was a perfectly good goal. Coventry should have won. They deserved to.

This would have been one of the great comebacks in FA Cup history. For a second-tier team to come back from 3-0 down with 20 minutes left against a team of that fame and pedigree to potentially win the game was extraordinary. The sheer joy and ecstasy on the faces of the Coventry fans, incredulous that their team could perform such a feat against the great Manchester United made every fan of every other club just wish something like that would happen to them.

VAR was introduced to eliminate human error and to bring a more scientific and measurable accuracy to decisions like this. The reality is that it's done nothing of the kind and in fact has made things worse.

Yet the worst thing of all this is that it denied Coventry fans their moment of ecstasy, a moment they would bask in for the rest of their lives.

It is part of a general fallacy in our culture, that science and objectivity give us all the answers we need. So, we try to reduce the role of human instinct, on the assumption that only what can be measured and exactly delineated is of any value. Hence Boris Johnson's mantra “follow the science” during the COVID pandemic.

The reality is that ‘following the science’ still leaves a place for human decision. Science doesn't necessarily tell you what to do. During the pandemic it could tell us about the rate of spread of the virus, but it didn't dictate that a lockdown of the severity which we endured was necessarily the right way to deal with it. There was a human choice to be made, balancing the effect on the economy and the potential loss of life with the mental impact upon young people that is now becoming apparent.

In football, VAR doesn't solve every issue. It can tell whether the ball hit a defender’s hand in the penalty area, but it still requires a subjective judgement by the referee or VAR official. Over the weekend’s semi-finals, it was decided to not award a penalty against Manchester City's Jack Grealish, but to do the opposite for Manchester United's Aaron Wan-Bissaka, for virtually identical actions. VAR has not taken refereeing decisions out of the equation. It hasn’t made it any better.

Yet the worst thing of all this is that it denied Coventry fans their moment of ecstasy, a moment they would bask in for the rest of their lives. It was the kind of moment for which football fans live – the experience that makes the years of watching 1-0 defeats away from home, trudging around the country following your team, worthwhile. A moment that, even as a Man United fan, I would not want to deny them. Of course I'll support United in the final against the robotically efficient Manchester City, but in that moment, VAR destroyed joy. And if that joy is caused by a marginal human error, who cares? Better to have the possibility of joy than a world where it gets taken away by a spoilsport official in a darkened room watching screens and drawing fine lines across the pitch.

Thinking that we can rely on the seen and not the unseen is fundamentally flawed.

Blaise Pascal once famously wrote that “The heart has its reasons of which Reason knows nothing.” His point was that we have a deep instinct for things which we just know are right, that we cannot prove and just have to assume, and the attempt to reduce everything to rationality, to scientific explanation, to what can be measured, thinking that we can rely on the seen and not the unseen is fundamentally flawed. Ever since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century we have lived with this dream of a perfectly scientific world where everything can be reduced to numbers, mechanisms and measurements. In such a world there is no room for God, no room for miracles. It even conspired to rule out the joy of Coventry fans celebrating a wildly unlikely winner.

It tries to delude us that it takes subjective human or moral judgement out of the equation. but it can never do that. And in doing that, it sucks the joy out of life. Science is a great gift, and it can tell us a lot about our world. But it cannot tell us everything. It was never meant to bear such weight and the sooner we realise that it has its limits, and doesn't overstep its boundaries, the better.

Essay

Creed

Politics

10 May 2024

7 min read

MAGA’s sorting of America

What would Bonhoeffer make of the rogue creed?

Jared Stacy

Jared Stacy holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

A red baseball cap, with Make America Great Again written across it, sits on an open bible.

Natilyn Photography on Unsplash.

“Ten years is a long time in the life of every human being.” So begins Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s essay, After Ten Years. For him, the decade in question was 1933 to 1943. The place, Germany.

The original essay, penned to mark the new year of 1943, reflects on the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s ascendancy to power through democratic machinery. The piece was sent to an inner circle of Bonhoeffer’s friends. “Are we still of any use?” asks Bonhoeffer. There’s a question I can relate to.

And so, I’ve returned to these modest words again and again these last few years. They’re prophetic, a jolt of honesty born of resilient hope. Not unlike Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, both could be modern epistles.

Their prophetic edge is clearer with eyes on our own situation. 2024 is not 1968 or 1933. As an American citizen, we have our own “decade” to reflect on in the United States. And that is the decade of MAGA, or “Make America Great Again.”

What began as a slogan became a cause which gave rise to a community.

Just 10 years ago, Trump wasn’t sitting in courtrooms. Back then, he stood on a stage to address the Conservative Political Action Conference. He wasn’t a candidate, but a businessman, reality TV star, and disrupter of status quo.

It was at that 2014 meeting Trump uttered that now ubiquitous slogan. Near the end of the speech, less rambling and sharper than his stream-of-consciousness rallies today, the line appears, “we need to make America great again.”

Trump wasn’t the first to use it, that was Reagan in 1980. Then, like now, it evoked a sense of nostalgia, of “good old days” that never were. But nostalgia is powerful, primal. It allows us to persist in the illusion that, for example, the social order of Jim Crow America was somehow more moral and upstanding than our present situation. As if lynchings, mob violence, and political inequality vanish in the mists of our longings. This is and can only be the imagination of white supremacy.

Trump didn’t invent the slogan, but perhaps he was the first to tap into its deepest lode in the bedrock. What began as a slogan became a cause which gave rise to a community. Now, “MAGA” is its own qualifier. We have “MAGA Republicans” and “MAGA Rallies” of the “MAGA faithful.”

Today, we ought to learn that we are simply not tweeting or posting our way out of this.

And where have churches been in these days? Hans Ulrich calls the church a “place of reversal” a place where rogue creeds and words ought to be emptied of their power, where a different public is constituted around the wine, bread, and water. But the lines of MAGA are drawn straight through our churches in America.

Caleb Campbell pastors in Phoenix, Arizona. I asked him recently his thoughts on the impending election, and how it would affect his church. Most churches have already been sorted, he told me. In 2020, churches fractured from within, torn from the pandemic, protests, and the Presidency. But now, there has been a sorting, and settling. The partisan lines, those borders the church is empowered to transgress, are sadly reinforced.

The lasting power of “Make America Great Again” over the last decade is significant. Among practicing Christians, the story we tell about America in our churches has theological consequences. And every church tells this story, implicitly or explicitly, in speech or in silence. And rather than emptying the rogue creed “Make America Great Again” it would seem that in and among many churches across America, it has been given an ample charge of theological authority.

MAGA trades in all the elements of a seemingly eradicated virus called fascism. A mythic past, demographic anxiety, authoritarian rule, all elements converging and colliding in American life. And curiously, the one thing that gives fascism its strength is a failure to remember.

And perhaps this is why Bonhoeffer’s letter, read on the rising tide of anti-democratic platforms, speaks so directly to us. It holds space for a necessary exercise of remembering.

“Who stands firm?” Bonhoeffer asks in the wake of Hitler’s ascendancy. Even the Confessing Church, organized to resist the Nazification of the German evangelical church, soon folded. Pastors either took the oath of loyalty, or enlisted. Time had proved how most attempts to stand firm in the Third Reich had collapsed in on themselves. Such failures mark our day, too.

Bonhoeffer answers his own question in a way that is instructive for us. He surveys all the failed responses to Hitler’s rise. For example, there’s the “reasonable ones” who simply think better answers and clearer communication win the day. Today, we ought to learn that we are simply not tweeting or posting our way out of this. Even more stalwart, institutional efforts fail here. In the torrent of raw information sewage flowing with conspiracies, algorithms, and slogans, reason isn’t enough.

Private virtue “closes its eyes to injustice” and scrolls its own virtue signaling posts with smug self-satisfaction.

There’s the ethical fanatic, who tries to “meet the power of evil with purity of principle.” Many in days like ours are earnest in their convictions, but white-knuckling principles is satisfied not with responsibility but with keeping to some arbitrary vision of integrity that prizes its artificiality, confusing the arbitrary refusal to cede principles with responsible action. There’s those of conscience who, Bonhoeffer notes, can never know the difference between a bad conscience (which can be strong) or a deceived conscience.

The path of duty seems attractive, until we recognize that “just following orders” is the justification of every functionary in Trump’s MAGA machine. And of course, freedom, which can side with the wrong to prevent the worst and so lose its own solid footing. When all else fails, Bonhoeffer holds out private virtue as that last course of action. Not to be confused with monastic retreat, private virtue “closes its eyes to injustice” and scrolls its own virtue signaling posts with smug self-satisfaction.

If all these routes are taken off the table, we find ourselves in position to recognize a bitter truth: we’ve made resisting Trump a good business. Good for convincing stakeholders to fund new ventures, good for justifying ourselves as a moral opposition. After 10 years of MAGA, it’s true that we have assumed much about democracy that can only be realized by vigilance.

Our democracy is a spectacle, not a process. It is an oligarchy of represented interests, not a democracy of representatives. And Trump? The ethos of greatness has always been tied to the former, not the latter. And it is in this situation, not uncommon throughout history, but novel for us who face it, that we can receive the question, “who stands firm?” Bonhoeffer’s question resounds.

If the resistance of reason, principles, duty, or virtue fail, then what? Bonhoeffer’s insistence is that responsible action is “nothing but an answer to God’s question and call.”

Does this mean only Christians can save the world? That Christians are inherently “better” or “righteous” in politics? No. But ten years of MAGA would seem to suggest that this belief continues to animate the evangelical political machine. This is not Christendom; living “in answer to God’s question” means that Christians, simply by virtue of the story we confess and participate in, point to the One who saves.

The singular answer Christians give, of a witness to God’s call, is a window into the story in which the world may find its salvation and hope. Logics of inclusion and exclusion are shattered in the event of reconciliation. There’s a politics in these wider horizons that can heal the bitter contempt that marks our present situation. And sure, Bonhoeffer’s conclusion may strike some as trite sentimentality, of veiled Christian piety that belongs anywhere but politics or the public square. But that’s precisely it.

The Christian story creates a public with its own politics. And this doesn’t mean the church is a counter-society, set up against the world, rather, it is precisely in our participating with fellow citizens in the mess of political process where such a witness can be given and made. There is a free responsibility to this presence. This is not Christian dominance, Christendom 2.0, or MAGA visions of authoritarian power dressed up in Christian rhetoric. This is something more modest, and yet deeply radical.

A decade of MAGA ought to have taught many of us much more than we currently know. And such learning can only happen once we stop incentivizing and normalizing assaults on democratic machinery that come to us as a spectacle for our consumptive entertainment. There remains a way to stand firm, a way that resists necessities and immediacies, primarily because it has the audacity to confess the truth that the world is already reconciled, it just doesn’t know it yet. And nowhere is this ignorance more concentrated than in the retributive, ascendant vision contained in the phrase, “Make America Great Again.”