Column
Comment
Ethics
Football
Politics
5 min read

PSG’s win signals politics over purpose – other institutions take note

When church and football feign neutrality, politics can ride roughshod
A footballer holds up the European cup, behind him fans are jubillant.
PSG fans celeberate.
PSG.TV.

There’s a new name on the Champions League trophy.  

In the most one-sided final in the competition’s history, Paris Saint-Germain trounced Inter Milan 5-0 to lift Europe’s most prestigious club trophy for the first time in their history. 

But this is not the PSG of recent years. Gone are the Galacticos: no Messi, no Neymar, no Mbappe. Where previously PSG resembled a 13-year-old boy’s attempt to win Football Manager by just buying all the best players, this year’s team looks like … well, a team. 

And what a team. Vitinha is metronomic in midfield. The game is played at his pace. He is the jazz instructor in Whiplash. “Not my tempo,” he says, over and over again, until reality bends to his will. Hakimi and Mendes are boundless balls of energy as the two wing-backs. They always threaten and it is no surprise that Hakimi gets the first goal. 

And then there are the forwards. 19-year-old Désiré Doué somehow looks the consummate professional at such a young age. Ousmane Dembélé has a quiet night by his standards, but the Barcelona reject looks born to play for this team. Khvicha Kvaratskhelia is the kind of footballer you imagine yourself as when playing on school playgrounds. So unorthodox, but simply irresistible. The ultimate jumpers-for-goalposts footballer. He may well be the closest thing football has to a personification of what the sport is all about. He is joy and flare masquerading as a 24-year-old Georgian lad. 

At the helm of it all is Luis Enrique. Enrique’s teams are aggressive, fluid, and intelligent. “They pass forward with spite” Steven Gerrard says during the TV coverage of the match. What a line.  

In 2019, Enrique lost his youngest daughter Xana to bone cancer, aged just nine. To hear him talk about his loss is heartbreaking. At full-time the PSG fans unveil a picture of Xana with her dad in a genuinely tender moment of compassion and humanity. 

All this is to say that, wherever you look, this incarnation of PSG is a deeply, deeply likeable one.  

But then, that’s the point, isn’t it? 

PSG were taken over by Qatar Sports Investments in 2011. Qatar’s near 15-year involvement with the club has led to eye-watering sums of money being spent with the stated aim of winning the Champions League. In 2017, they sign Neymar from Barcelona, meeting the €222 million release clause in his contract. A fee so deliberately high no-one would ever meet it. A fee still unsurpassed eight years on.  

While the age of the superstars may be over at PSG, they still have European football’s highest wage budget by some distance (an impressive feat when you remember that Real Madrid exist). Their Georgian talisman Kvaratskhelia only moved to the club in January for a reported €70m. Hardly loose change. 

Paris Saint-Germain is a Qatari ‘sportswashing’ project. An attempt to make a political regime palatable to European sensibilities by assembling a football team that is deeply, deeply likeable.  

And it certainly seems to be working. Rio Ferdinand, on co-commentary for the final, declared that a PSG victory would be ‘good for football’. So did Jason Burt, chief football correspondent for The Telegraph in an article that unironically has a subtitle starting “They may be funded by a nation state but …”. 

This is why I find it so disingenuous when people demand we ‘keep politics out of football’. (And anyway, what people often mean here is that they’d like to keep left-wing politics out of football, like the ‘take a knee’ or ‘rainbow laces’ campaigns). Politics is already in football and has been for quite some time now. If you haven’t spotted it, you simply haven’t been paying attention. 

I like Luis Enrique. I adore Vitinha. Kvaratskhelia makes me misty-eyed about the very nature of football. But PSG winning the Champions League is bad for football, because it’s a political victory before it’s a sporting one

PSG’s triumph is a timely reminder to the Church that it must remember the political nature of the call placed upon its very existence.

As is so often the case, football and religion find parallels in one another. For the Church, too, all too frequently finds itself as a political football. Debate continues about the place of Church of England Bishops in the House of Lords with only 33 per cent of Britons keen for religious leaders to express political opinions.  

But while this would certainly make the Church’s life easier, it’s simply not an option available to it. 

‘Gospel’ is not a Christian term. Not originally. It was a term used to describe an announcement or decree made about the Roman Emperor, a practice the Romans adopted from the Greeks before them. It is, in other words, an intractably political term. It is the ‘party-political broadcast’ of the ancient world.  

In hijacking the term ‘Gospel’ as a description for Jesus’ life and teaching, the early Church announces itself as an irrevocably political entity from its very beginnings. A body of people called to proclaim a political message. Or, at least, a message with significant political implications. Christ is king; Caesar is not.  

This does not mean that the Church is inherently left- or right-leaning. The Church is far older than this simplistic understanding of politics and will surely outlive it, too. But it does mean that the Church has a stake in the politics of the day; that it cannot be politically disinterested without simultaneously compromising something of its most fundamental identity.  

PSG’s Champions League win is not the first by a nation-backed club. Manchester City – principally owned by Vice President of the United Arab Emirates Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan – won the Champions League in 2023 (also beating Inter Milan in the final; bless them). Depending on what we make of Roman Abramovich’s connections to the Russian state, it’s also worth noting Chelsea’s wins in 2012 and 2021, too. 

But PSG’s win – and the emphatic nature of it over one of the ‘old guards’ of club football – feels like a watershed moment for the sport. It is the culmination of the past 20-or-so years of both football’s internal politics, and the external politics acting upon it. It is a worrying statement of intent of its direction of travel, too.  

When Christianity and football feign political neutrality, they simply invite the dominant politics of the day to ride roughshod over them. Insidious politics will always fill any vacuum available to it. PSG’s triumph is a timely reminder to the Church that it must remember the political nature of the call placed upon its very existence. Otherwise it will find itself a mouthpiece for a kingdom to which it does not belong.  

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Article
Assisted dying
Comment
Freedom of Belief
Politics
5 min read

Holding an opposing view is not 'imposing' belief on the assisted dying debate

Opposing interventions from believers on dishonesty grounds is a sinister development in public debate

Nick is an author and Senior Fellow at Theos,a think tank.

A graphic shows a gallery of people with religious symbols on their clothing.

“There are some who oppose this crucial reform,” Esther Rantzen wrote recently of MPs who dared to opposed Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life private member’s bill. “Many of them have undeclared personal religious beliefs…  [do] they have the right to impose them on patients like me, who do not share them?” 

This is a peculiarly common argument for those who support the right to Assisted Dying, which is surprising as it would be hard to come up with a less coherent case against religion in public life. The idea that elected MPs engaged in parliamentary debate are “imposing” their will on other people is odd. The idea that MPs have undeclared personal religious beliefs is strange too. I think it’s fair to say that most people know that Shabana Mahmood is a Muslim or Tim Farron is a Christian, and for those that don’t know that but do have access to Google, it takes less than five seconds to find out the religious beliefs of an MP. 

Perhaps most tellingly, however, why is it that we should be alert to – read wary of – MPs religious beliefs? Do the non-religious not have beliefs of which we should be cognizant? If my MP is motivated by a philosophy of relentless, Peter Singer-like utilitarianism or vague, incoherent secular humanism I’d like to know. 

In truth, Rantzen’s intervention in this debate, like that of a number of others – Lord Falconer, Simon Jenkins, Humanists UK, etc. – is part of a recent and rather dispiriting attempt to de facto exclude religious contribution to public debates by accusing them of being dishonest. 

To be clear, secular voices have long tried to exclude religious ones, but the tactics change. Back in the New Atheist heyday of the early twenty first century, all you needed to do was splutter something about sky fairies or Bronze Age beliefs or mind viruses to close down any sort of religious intervention. If, as Richard Dawkins famously put it, faith was one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus only harder to eradicate, no sensible parliament could possibly want to heed what faith had to say. 

Even back then, however, there were subtler arguments against faith, which usually came in the form of semi-digested Rawslian political liberalism, and demanded the religious participation in public debate had to obey the strictures of “public reasoning”, using logic and language that “all reasonable people” will understand. 

There are quite a few holes in this particular away of thinking (who are “reasonable people” anyway?) but as a rule of thumb, it’s not a bad one to follow. It is quite right and proper, if only as a matter of pragmatism, to speak in terms that your opponents will get, just as it is right and proper, as a matter of courtesy, to be open about what ultimately motivates you. 

And so that is what religious figures – MPs, leaders, institutions – do. Having read through pretty much all their contributions to the assisted dying debate, in parliament and beyond, I can testify that not many people, on either side of the debate, quote scripture or invoke papal teaching as a way of persuading, let alone commanding, others. (As it happens, parliamentarians haven’t really done that since the 1650s, but that’s another story).  

Rather, they argue in terms of policy and principles. They talk about the risk of legislative slippage, of changing attitudes to the vulnerable, of the need for better palliative care, of existing pressures on the NHS, etc. This is quite right and proper. As James Cleverly remarked in the Common debate in November, “We are speaking about the specifics of this Bill: this is not a general debate or a theoretical discussion, but about the specifics of the Bill”. And so that is what they did. 

Does anyone seriously think it is a good idea to compel a believing Jew to stand up in parliament and declare her faith before she were allowed to speak? 

In effect, religious public figures, whether or not their beliefs are “declared”, do what they have (rightly) been asked to do by those who have appointed themselves as gatekeepers for our public debate. And so this has forced the usual suspects to pivot in their argument. No longer able to dismiss religious contributions for what they say (“don’t quote the Bible at me!”) they are now compelled to dismiss them for what they don’t say. Hence, the trope that has become popular among such campaigners – “you are not being honest about your real motivations”. 

A new report from the think tank Theos, entitled, How much have your religious views influenced your decision?”: religion and the assisted dying debate, unpacks the various objections that have been levelled at the religious contribution to the debate, and then systematically dismantles them.

Some of these objections are old school in the extreme.  

Religious belief is too intellectually inadequate or disfiguring for debates of this nature. 

Religion is insufficiently willing to adapt and compromise for politics.  

Faith is ill-fitted or even inadmissible in a secular polity or culture.  

But the report majors on the newer objection, so clearly displayed by Esther Rantzen, what we might call “dishonesty” objection, that religious contributors are fundamentally dishonest about their motivations and objectives. 

In truth, this is no stronger than the more tried and tested objections, and it displays a serious, possibly intentional, misunderstanding of what a religious argument actually is. To quote the political philosopher Jeremy Waldron, such secular campaigners “present it as a crude prescription from God, backed up with threat of hellfire, derived from general or particular revelation, and they contrast it with the elegant simplicity of a philosophical argument by Rawls (say) or Dworkin [and] with this image in mind, they think it obvious that religious argument should be excluded from public life.” 

Contemporary arguments against religion in public life are slightly more sophisticated than Waldron’s caricature here, but not much. The idea that religio should be “declared” as a competing interest, so as to stop religious participants in debate from being “dishonest” is every bit as sinister, against both the letter and the spirit of plural, liberal democracy. Does anyone seriously think it is a good idea to compel a believing Jew to stand up in parliament and declare her faith before she were allowed to speak?  

As the assisted dying debate returns to parliament for the final push, there will be much animated debate. That is quite right and proper. A democracy needs vigorous and honest argument. But part of that honesty involves opening the doors of debate to everyone, and not subtly trying to exclude those with whom you disagree on the spurious grounds that they are being dishonest.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. 
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
 
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief