Article

Belief

Community

Creed

Football

Sport

29 April 2025

7 min read

Liverpool's title win shows us that we’re built for community

Answering the question of who do we belong to.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

Amid celebrating football fans, one stands on top of a kiosk with outstretched arms.

Liverpool fans celebrate outside their stadium.

Jonathan Rowlands.

“A Liverbird upon my chest

We are men of Shankly’s best

A team that plays the Liverpool way

And wins the Championship in May”

This is the song that has thundered around Anfield this season. A prophecy willed into existence amidst the departure of Jürgen Klopp, Liverpool’s Shankly for the twenty-first century. Surely not?

But then.

Arsenal drop points and Manchester City drop points and Liverpool don’t drop points. Again and again and again, until Liverpool needs just one more point to make the song a reality. The next game? Spurs at Anfield. At Anfield. As fate would have it, my wife and I had front-row tickets, thanks to my father- and mother-in-law booking a fortunately timed (for us, anyway) holiday and not being able to use their season ticket. (Thanks, Jeff and Janet).

As we got to the stadium the place thrummed with anticipation. Liverpool is a city that loves to sing, and to dance, and to cuddle; a city built for joy and for love. And here is Liverpool in all its splendour, drenched in glorious, league-winning sunshine, as people sing and dance and cuddle. Most people here won’t have a ticket; Anfield only holds 60,000. People are here just to be here, to be present; around for when it happens.

The game kicks off and the noise is deafening. Liverpool only needs to avoid defeat in the next ninety minutes and the league is theirs. Spurs, inconsistent all season, surely haven’t got the mettle to get anything from the game. Have they?

But then.

Spurs score. An unmarked header from a corner. As simple as it gets. Former Liverpool player Dom Solanke, no less. It was never going to be easy. 2025 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Miracle of Istanbul; if any club knows how to make a game of football difficult for themselves, it’s Liverpool. The ground turns from jubilant to tense.

But then.

Salah passes to Szoboszlai who passes to Diaz who scores. Three short passes and Spurs are carved open and all our wildest dreams have come true.

But then.

Flag’s up. Offside. No goal. Doesn’t count. Was it Szoboszlai or Diaz offside? Was it close? Doesn’t matter. The ground turns from jubilant to tense.

But then.

VAR – which I’ve always said was really good, actually, I promise – overturns the flag. Goal. Liverpool are level. The ground erupts. But there’s still work to do. While a draw would see Liverpool over the line, there’s a lot of football left to go before the ninety minutes is up

And so Liverpool press and press and press and press. They hound Spurs, hassle them, harass them. Ryan Gravenberch has the ball on the edge of their box and is almost certainly fouled. The ref – who, to his credit, did his utmost to try and ensure a game of football didn’t break out because we wouldn’t possibly want that – decides otherwise. Nothing to see here. Play on.

But then.

Alexis Mac Allister picks up the loose ball, takes a touch, and thumps it – properly wallops it – right into the top corner. Anfield shakes and I’m being hugged by someone from somewhere unseen. Now is the time when it happens, when we win the thing we’ve waited so long to win. Being a football fan doesn’t get better than this.

But then.

It does. Liverpool have a corner. The ball comes in, Cody Gakpo collects, wriggles, turns, shoots, scores. No coming back for Spurs now. Bedlam. Pandemonium. Carnage. He runs to the corner nearest us, top off, a message on his vest underneath. Daylight.

“What does his shirt say?” my wife asks. I strain, trying to see, but I can barely remember my own name at this point so I can hardly be expected to read now, can I?

But then.

There he is, just meters from us, walking back with his top still off, the message clear:

I belong to Jesus

There are two more goals in the second half and the game finishes 5-1 and Liverpool are champions. But honestly, it was all over bar the singing at half-time. And there was a lot of singing still to do. Each player worthy of their own song, the club’s past eulogised over in verse and chorus. And Liverpool’s past means they are no stranger to success. This league title means they are now indisputably, by any metric going, England’s most successful football club. (Hiya, Sir Alex, if you’re reading this).

But the Premier League has remained oddly elusive: this is only the second time the club has won the competition since it formed in 1992 (although they had won eighteen top-flight titles prior to this; there was, I’m told, still football before the early 90s). And the last league win came at the start of lockdown.

What’s the point of winning if I can’t be there to hug you and you and you and you?

Look: I celebrated that Covid League title; of course I did. But it felt odd, and the oddness has only increased as normality has gradually returned to life since the pandemic. My wife has a picture of me opening a bottle of champagne in our otherwise empty living room. The players life the trophy in an otherwise empty stadium. With hindsight, there’s an unavoidably melancholy tinge to the whole thing. You spend your life imagining what it’ll be like to win the Big Shiny Thing and then it happens when it’s illegal to leave your house (or something; lockdown is just a big blur to me at this point).

But then.

2025 rolls around and we get to do it again. Together. Even the ones who don’t have tickets are there. Everyone is there. Together. And all the while I can’t stop thinking about Cody Gakpo with his top off. I Belong to Jesus.

Gakpo’s a weird footballer, truth be told. He’s unbelievably technically gifted, rapid, and yet somehow enormous, too. He’s scored hugely significant goals for Liverpool. And yet, he’s unlikely to be anyone’s favourite player. He lacks the unflappable brilliance of Rolls-Royce Centre Back Virgil Van Dijk, the sheer inevitability and perfection of Mo Salah, or even the outright gets-you-on-your-feet electricity of Luis Diaz. He's unlikely to be named Player of the Year or to have a statue outside Anfield when he retires. But there he is: 60,000 feral scousers wrapped around his finger, the eyes of the footballing world on him. And what’s his message to them? I belong to Jesus.

I don’t know much about economics, but I’m told often that things are only worth what people are willing to pay for them. This is certainly true of footballers, anyway: one player might be worth significantly more to one club over another. But, in Christ, His infinitely valuable perfect Son, God declares that you and I are of infinite value. The One who’s judgement is perfect and faultless has decided you are worth the incalculable cost of His perfect and faultless Son. And so you are. It’s just a matter of simple economics.

I forget this so often, that I am Jesus’ gift to Himself. I find it so hard to imagine myself as a gift. But there I am. I belong to Jesus. I didn’t know what to expect when we turned up to Anfield, but it certainly wasn’t a reminder of the worth Christ has placed on my very existence. But there I am. I belong to Jesus. And so does Cody Gakpo.

The reason the Covid title feels so melancholy is that we couldn’t celebrate together. What’s the point of winning if I can’t be there to hug you and you and you and you? Liverpool’s League win, the euphoria that came with being able to share that win together with other people, gives us some slight sliver of a glimpse into the value Jesus Himself places in sharing His life with us. I reckon Cody Gakpo knows this, too. Because he knows he belongs to Jesus. He knows that he is the prize Jesus has won for himself. He is Jesus’ Premier League winning win at Anfield. Jesus wants to spend eternity with Cody Gakpo more than 60,000 feral scousers want to win the League. He wants to spend eternity with me and with you and with that person you find deeply annoying.

It’s really easy for this all to sound saccharine and trite. “Ooh I went to a football match and it was like a big party in heaven, isn’t that nice?” But there is some truth to the glibness here. Football is better together because humans are made for togetherness. And this is seen no clearer than in Jesus’ desire to win togetherness with us, through his faithful and obedient life of sacrifice.

As Cody Gakpo would say: I belong to Jesus. Or, as the Kop sang on repeat: Liverpool! Hallelujah, Hallelujah!

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Article

Belief

Church and state

Comment

Politics

6 August 2025

6 min read

Danny Kruger, Christian values, and the dangers of thin religion

Thick or thin? Christianity’s role in Britain’s cultural crossroad

Graham Tomlin

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

A backbench MP stands in an almost empty chamber and speaks

Danny Kruger addressing Parliament.

Parliament TV.

In case you hadn’t noticed, a speech given to an audience of about seven people in a sparse House of Commons recently went viral. Danny Kruger’s recent call for a Christian restoration in the UK has generated a lot of attention.

I've noticed two distinct responses in recent days. On one side, there are three (or more) cheers for Danny. He has been interviewed at Christian festivals, lauded for a brave, deeply considered and soulful appeal to the Christian heritage of the nation. He has been thinking deeply about this for some time as demonstrated in his book Covenant, sometimes seen as a manifesto for a renewed Conservatism based around the claims of family, community and nation, and summarised in this Seen & Unseen article. As one of the most prominent voices against the recent bills to permit assisted dying and the termination of full-term embryos, he is clearly reeling from the impact of these devastating recent votes in the Commons that, more than anything else, seem to demonstrate how far the nation has slipped its Christian moorings.

Yet it’s not hard to stumble across another reaction. A former Bishop of Oxford called Kruger’s claim that the UK was a Christian nation anachronistic and counter-productive. Others have pointed out that many Jews, Muslims or hardened atheists would not be delighted to be told that ‘it is your church and you are its member.’ Others question whether there can be such a thing as a 'Christian nation'.

Some have picked up on a darker side to all this. Recent riots outside hostels for immigrants in Rotherham and Norwich showed protesters carrying flags of St George, even brandishing a wooden cross. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, and Nigel Farage have recently been speaking much more openly about the ‘Christian values’ on which Britain is founded, and many on the extreme right seem to have latched onto Christianity as at the heart of what they see as a cultural, civilisational war. Kruger’s talk of the gap left by Christianity’s demise being filled by Islam and, what worries him more, a kind of ‘wokeism’ that blends ‘ancient paganism, Christian heresies and the cult of modernism’, sets up a stark opposition. He goes on: “That religion, unlike Islam, must simply be destroyed, at least as a public doctrine. It must be banished from public life.” Does that language stray a bit too close to the aggressive language of more extreme voices on the right?

Now I have some sympathy with this. I have written before of how I also fear the pagan gods are making a return. Like Danny Kruger, I too believe the recent votes in the House of Commons are a dark and dangerous turn toward death not life. Yet I can’t shake a nervous feeling that, without some careful thought, we might be summoning up shades we might not be able to control.

The signs – and the solution - lie in the past. For centuries, Christianity, like all other religions, has been used as a weapon in civilisational wars. It happened in the Crusades of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. It happened in the Balkan wars involving Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990s and 2000. It happened in the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, where your neighbour being Protestant or Catholic was a reason to kill them.

Theologians and sociologists sometimes talk of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ religion. ‘Thin’ religion is simply a badge of identity. It often blends religion, politics and nationalism and serves as a motivation to unite people around a cause, such as Hindu nationalism, Muslim victimhood, or Christian supremacy. It is religion seen purely as a label, a badge of tribal identity over against other religious identities, however deeply felt. It is often nostalgic, ranged against enemies who are determined to destroy it, denigrating those who are not part of the religion as less deserving of value. It sees the Christian god as one of many gods – our god – which we must fight for against other gods, rather than, as Christian theology has always taught, the one true God who sits above all other gods, the God of the whole earth. It is paradoxically a manifestation of the kind of the kind of culture that Danny Kruger hates: “a return to the pagan belief that your value is determined by your sex, race or tribe.” Tommy Robinson’s faith seems as good an example of this as any. This is ‘thin’ religion.

I propose a simple test. If someone advocates Christian values and regularly goes to church, then they have a legitimate voice.

‘Thick’ religion, however, is different. It is not just a badge of identity, but entails a set of distinct beliefs and practises. It means submitting yourself to the disciplines of the faith. In the Christian context, it a belief in God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that Jesus is the Son of God, that he died for the sins of the world, rose again on the third day and will return one day to judge the living and the dead. It involves a serious attempt to live the Christian life, to love your neighbour, and even your enemy, helping the poor and vulnerable, praying regularly, being consistently present at church worship and so on.

Christian hymns have always had a fair amount of militant imagery, from ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ to ‘Fight the Good Fight’, and more contemporary ones about God ‘fighting our battles’. Yet this has always meant a serious fight against enemies within – pride, greed, anger and spiritual lethargy. When it became focussed on human enemies, as it did in the Crusades, a line was crossed from ‘thick’ into ‘thin’ religion.

It's not always easy to tell the difference between those who adopt thick and thin Christianity. I propose a simple test. If someone advocates Christian values and regularly turns up at church, then they have a legitimate voice, and are worth a hearing. If they turn up weekly to hear the Bible being read, to take part in Holy Communion alongside other people, regardless of their ethnicity, wealth or background, pray regularly, then, we can assume, they are serious about it. They are submitting themselves to the discipline of learning Christian faith, seeking to love their neighbour and trying as hard as they can to love their enemies. They may fail from time to time but these are the signs of someone who has grasped the grace of God which is the heart of Christian faith. Danny Kruger passes that test. Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage, as far as I know, don’t.

If some shout loudly about Christian values, about the danger of losing the heritage of our civilization and yet show no interest in going to church, living the Christian life, praying or even trying to love their enemies, then we should take what they say with a large pinch of salt. They have no skin in the game.

When the heart of Christianity is hollowed out, it becomes moralism. It becomes the law not the gospel, as Martin Luther would say. The cross literally becomes a stick to beat others with. Paradoxically, it is only ‘thick’ religion that ends up founding and changing cultures. Early Christianity, the kind that converted the western world, was definitely ‘thick’ religion. It was not just a badge of identity. It had a whole set of distinct beliefs and practices that marked Christians off from the pagan world around them. It did not set out to advocate for political causes in the power corridors of Rome, build a Christian civilisation, lobby Caesar for ‘Christian laws’. It set out to produce people with ‘a sincere and pure devotion to Christ’ as St Paul put it, loving God, neighbour and enemy. And they changed the world by accident.

Thin religion is a dangerous thing. It uses religion as a tool for dominance and conflict. It makes sceptics think we need less religion in public life. Thick religion is good religion. It forms good people. It builds healthy societies. It’s the kind we need more of, not less.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
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If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

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