For a shining example of trade unionism, look no further than football

The Professional Footballers’ Association shows what can be achieved when everyone is working for the same goal

• 
• • Ellie Mae O'Hagan
  • theguardian.com, Thursday 21 August 2014 15.48 BST

The great Liverpool manager Bill Shankly. Photograph: Liverpool FC via Getty Images

“The socialism I believe in is everybody working for the same goal and everybody having a share in the rewards. That’s how I see football, that’s how I see life.” So said Bill Shankly, legend of Liverpool Football Club.

Liverpool fans (like me) who lovingly quote Shankly’s words are often told that we’re idealists; that his egalitarian vision is a far cry from the reality of contemporary football. But although socialism is going a bit far, Shankly may have had a point: because it is in British professional football that we find one of the most successful examples of modern trade unionism.

The Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) is the only trade union in the country to have 100% membership, and its principle success lies in its remarkable collective bargaining agreement, which applies to all professional footballers. It offers players numerous protections, including sickness arrangements, insurance in case of injury, post-retirement obligations and disciplinary proceedings (in which the PFA plays a central part).

Collective bargaining is the mechanism that allows workers to negotiate with employers as a whole workforce instead of as individuals. It puts workers in a more powerful position to obtain better terms and conditions, and can establish industry standards. Areport released this week by the Institute for Employment Rights demonstrates that collective bargaining can reduce pay inequality, narrow the gender pay gap, and protect employees from wage cuts during times of financial crisis. It can also reduce income inequality across society. The report notes: “When collective bargaining coverage began to fall in the 1980s, average wages also fell. As the number of workers covered by collective agreements has continued to decline, income inequality has rapidly grown.”

As only one in four British workers are now covered by collective bargaining, the PFA’s agreement is quite exceptional. In practice it means that all footballers are subject to exactly the same terms and conditions, regardless of whom they play for: a player for Luton Town will be treated in exactly the same way by his club as Cesc Fábregas will be for Chelsea. The ethos behind it is that every player puts in the same 90 minutes and should be valued in the same way.

In this respect, the PFA’s agreement is about building solidarity between leagues: the players in better negotiating positions (such as Fábregas) use their power, through the PFA, to improve the terms and conditions of every union member. As the career of a professional footballer lasts an average of just eight years, good terms and conditions are vital – especially for the players who are not in the position to earn top salaries or be offered sponsorship deals.

The PFA has fought to establish itself as an essential part of the professional game and is involved in all key decisions on regulations and how football is run in England. It recently played a pivotal role in ensuring that Portsmouth survived after its financial troubles, which was made possible by applying the “football creditors rule”. This rule is a protection negotiated by the union, which prioritises the players as creditors and imposes an obligation on any new owners to work with the union and honour existing contracts. As a result of this regulation and the solidarity of the players, every one of the 60 clubs that have gone into administration have survived, and remain an integral part of their communities.

Contradicting some employers who seek to undermine the strength of trade unions in workplaces, the PFA has demonstrated that unions – and by extension, workers themselves – are an essential component of industry, and can be good for employers too if they are trusted to take an active role in negotiations.

The case of Portsmouth FC begs the question of what other businesses might have survived administration during the past four years of recession if all unions were afforded the same level of trust that the PFA has been. Of course, the PFA is helped by the fact that footballers’ skills are very specific, but there is no reason why other industries can’t emulate its success by promoting trade unions in the workplace. Not doing so forces workers into a battle with employers, which doesn’t seem beneficial to either party.

What I find so extraordinary about the PFA is that it contradicts rightwing arguments that collective bargaining and trade unions are bad for business. When Governor Scott Walker outlawed collective bargaining in Wisconsin in 2012, he said: “The action today will help ensure Wisconsin has a business climate.”

We’ve been told for so long that better trade union rights will destroy the economy, and yet here is evidence of the benefits of strong trade unions being beamed into the living rooms of millions of people every weekend. As Nick Cusack, assistant chief executive of the PFA, puts it: “The PFA is the players’ greatest supporter. It shows trade unions can achieve a great deal of protections for workers. We’d like to see similar protections for workers across all industries.”

So there you have it. If you’re thinking of approaching your manager to get a better deal on your sick leave, think again. You might be better off talking to Wayne Rooney.

How we misunderstand risk in sport

Aggression, defence, success, failure, innovation - they are all about our willingness to take risks and how we judge them

Ed Smith in Cricinfo 

July 28, 2014

Same risk, different outcome: when a batsman goes after a bowler, he could end up being dismissed or hitting a six © Getty Images

The World Bank recently asked me to give a speech at a forum in London called "Understanding Risk". Initiall, I was unsure how I could approach the subject. How could I, an ex-sportsman turned writer, address financial experts on the question of risk?

On reflection, I realised there is another profession, followed around the world and relentlessly scrutinised, that relies almost entirely on the assessment of risk. Without risk, there can be no reward. Without risk, there are no triumphs. Without risk, there can be no progress.

And yet this entire profession, this whole sphere of human endeavour, doesn't really understand risk at all. It uses the term sloppily, even incorrectly. It criticises good risks and celebrates bad risks. It cannot distinguish between probabilities and outcomes.

It has changed its approach to risk, swapping one flawed approach for the opposite mistake. In the old amateur days, when it was run and managed like an old boys' club, there was little or no calculation of risk - merely unscientific anecdotes and old wives' tales. But the brave new dawn of social science didn't prove any better. In fact, it might be even worse. People put too much faith in maths, metrics and quantification. It has lurched from old boy's network to a pseudo-science - without pausing en route where it ought permanently to reside: with the acknowledgment that risk requires subjective but expert judgement. There is no perfect formula. If there was, everyone with a brain would succeed.

The sphere I describe, of course, is not finance or banking but professional sport. Sporting strategy - sometimes analytical and planned, sometimes instant and intuitive - always revolves around the assessment of risk. Taking risks is what sportsmen do for a living. And yet the analysis of risk does not match this practical reality. We usually talk in clichés not truths, often criticising good risks and praising bad risk-taking.

Here are four ways the sports world often misinterprets risk.

Risk is everywhere

In cricket, every attacking shot played by a batsman carries an element of risk, no matter how small. Stop playing shots and you cannot score runs. "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take," as Wayne Gretzky, the greatest ice hockey player of all time, put it.

And it is amazing when you stop playing attacking shots how much better bowlers bowl. Effective risk-taking has an intimidatory effect. Total risk-aversion the opposite: it emboldens your opponent, making him feel safe and relaxed.

In football, when a midfield player advances up the pitch, he is trying to orchestrate a goal while also reducing his own team's defensive protection. In risking creating a goal, he increases the risk of conceding one. Defenders, too, constantly weigh risks. Pressing the opposition, trying to get the ball back from them, is a risk. In moving up the pitch without possession, you create space behind you - if they are good enough to keep the ball and get past you.

But the alternative - safety-first defending - brings risks of another kind. If you never press, and always retreat into the safety of deep defensive organisation, then you rarely regain the ball. You dig your own trench, unable to threaten or frighten the opposition, merely sitting there waiting for the next wave of attack.

Tennis is all about risk. With your groundstrokes, if you are determined never to lose a point by hitting the ball long, not even once, then sadly you won't play with enough depth to make life difficult for your opponent. You will make zero errors and still lose.

And when it's your turn to return, if you never run round your backhand in the hope of hitting a forehand winner, then you will allow your opponent to settle into a comfortable serving rhythm. In the pursuit of good returning, you have to risk getting aced. You have to risk failure in the short term to give yourself a chance in the long term. You have to dare to be great.

Being right is not the same thing as events turning out well

You can be right and fail. You can be wrong and succeed.

	Sport is about problem-solving. And the best way to discover new, better methods is to allow people to experiment through trial and error. Don't see what everyone else is doing and copy it. Find a better way

Sport rarely allows for this. We say that winning "justified the decision", a classic failure to distinguish between ex ante and ex poste thinking. Instead, the real question should be: would I do the same thing again, given the information I had at the time? Coaches and captains often make the right calls and lose. And they often make the wrong calls and win. It is stupid to judge a man's judgement on a sample size of one event.

The same point applies to risks taken by players. An unthinking tribal fan will shout "hero" when a risk-taking batsman hits a six, then scream "idiot" when the same shot ends up in a fielder's hands.

What a champion to take on the bowler! What a fool to take such a risk! The inconsistency here is not the batsman's, it is the spectator's. Coward/hero, fool/champion, disgrace/legend. The same risk can lead to either assessment.

Many crucial risks are invisible 

There are risks that no one sees that still have to be taken. Critics delude themselves that the only form of bravery in sport is guts and determination. At least as important is nerve, or, put differently, the capacity to endure risk imperceptibly.

When I was commentating with Sourav Ganguly at Lord's last week, he told me that Virender Sehwag used to shout, "He missed a four!" while he was in the dressing room watching team-mates batting. Ganguly quite rightly added that missing an opportunity to do something good is just as much of a mistake as making a visible error.

Many teams imperceptibly yield an advantage through timidity, fearfulness, and anxiety about standing out for the wrong reasons - an advantage they never subsequently reverse.

During the last Ashes series, I used this column to develop the metaphor of looking at sport as an old-fashioned battlefield. As the front lines engage and each army tries to advance, the direction of travel will be determined by tiny acts of skill and bravery - and equally imperceptible acts of risk aversion.

Somewhere on the front line, an infantryman inches a foot closer to his ally, hiding his own shield slightly behind his friend's. Hence one man becomes fractionally safer - but if the action is repeated a thousand times, the front line becomes significantly narrower and weaker as a whole. No one individual can be singled out as a hopeless failure. But the group suffers a collective diminution.

So it is in sport. When a batsman fails to hit a half-volley for four because he is too cautious, an opportunity is wasted to exploit an advantage offered to his team.

We talk a great deal about momentum, but not enough about how momentum is created. Once the whole army is retreating, even the bravest soldiers can fail to hold the line. We talk of courage when the tide has already turned. So in place of the usual clichés, "out-fought", "out-toughed", "out-hungered", I have a simpler word: outplayed. Or, even better, "quietly, perhaps indiscernibly, defeated by superior risk-taking".

The essential risk of being prepared to look silly

This is how sport moves forward. In 1968, a professional athlete had a crazy idea. Madder still, he had this idea just before the tournament event of his life. He wanted to rip up the coaching manual and do it all his own way. His coaches told him to forget about it, to stick with the old way of doing things, not to rock the boat.

He ignored them. He was a high-jumper, and he instinctively wanted to go over the bar head first, back down - not, as everyone else did, leg first, face down. At the 1968 Mexico Olympics, despite everyone telling him he was mad, he went ahead with his revolutionary technique. And how did it work out? He won a gold medal and set a new world record. He was called Dick Fosbury and he'd just invented the Fosbury Flop.

Sport is about problem-solving. A challenge is set: kick the ball into the net; hit the ball over the boundary; jump over the bar. From then on, solutions evolve, sometimes deliberately, sometimes by accident. And the best way to discover new, better methods is to allow people to experiment through trial and error. Don't see what everyone else is doing and copy it. Find a better way.

The left-field question is the one to ask. Why shouldn't I jump over the high-jump bar head first? Why shouldn't I aim my sweep shot towards off side where there aren't any fielders (the reverse sweep, the switch hit)?

Sport moves forward when it is irreverent, resistant to authority. The greatest cricketer of all time, Don Bradman, used a technique that no one has dared to try out a second time. His bat swing started way out to the side, rather than as a straight pendulum line from behind him.

Let me repeat. The method that made Bradman one and a half times better than the second-best player was consigned to the rubbish bin of sporting ideas. Bradman was prepared to look stupid by risking a unique rather than textbook technique. Others have been unwilling or unable to follow.

Bradman, however, benefited from one huge slice of luck. He escaped the greatest risk that can befall any genius: formal education. He learnt to bat on his own, using the empirical method, without a coaching manual. As a child he would repeatedly hit a golf ball against the curved brick base of his family's water tank.

Here is a startling thought. How many Bradmans were persuaded to try the usual technique? How many Fosburys were talked out of taking a chance?

In the course of trying to be different and better, you have to bear the risk of being different and worse.

How much talent does the difficult player need?

Exceptionally gifted but unreliable players are often given lots of rope by management, but far too many seem to believe themselves to be deserving of that leeway

Ed Smith

May 20, 2014

 

	It's no surprise that Shane Warne was able to criticise Australia coach John Buchanan and not be dropped for it © Getty Images  Enlarge

It's been a mixed week for sportsmen out of love with the authorities. Michael Carberry, overlooked after the Ashes tour, publicly stated his frustrations about a lack of communication from the selectors. Many assumed that Carberry, aged 33, had signed his own death warrant and would never play for England again. But the selectors have made a shrewd decision in recalling him. He is a decent, understated man; the England management now looks magnanimous in overlooking a few surprising quotes in a newspaper.

No such luck for Samir Nasri, the wonderfully gifted but moody French footballer. He has been left out of France's World Cup squad. France's coach, Didier Deschamps, explained his decision with bracing honesty: "He's a regular starter at Manchester City. That's not the case today with the France team. And he also said he's not happy when he's a substitute. I can tell you that you can feel it in the squad." Deschamps went further, anticipating his critics by conceding that Nasri was more talented than some players he had selected: "It's not necessarily the 23 best French players, but it's the best squad in my eyes to go as far as possible in this competition."

Talent v unity: an old story.

Rugby union, though, has also brought two mavericks back into the fold. Gavin Henson, Wales' troubled but mercurial playmaker, looks set to return to the red jersey. And England's Danny Cipriani, another flair player who has never found a happy home wearing national colours, has been thrown a lifeline. A last chance that both Henson and Cipriani cannot afford to miss? I bet they have heard that before. And then been handed just one final, last chance. That's often the way with rare talent: different rules apply.

As always, these debates have generally descended into an argument about abstract principles. Pundits have rushed to say that French football has a problem with finding a home for left-field characters. Other have bridled at Deschamps' logic: who should be happy being put on the bench anyway? It is the job of managers, we are often told, to finesse and handle talented but unconventional personalities. Indeed, with a moment's reflection, anyone can produce a list of world-beating players who didn't conform to a coach's template for a model professional - from Diego Maradona to Andrew Flintoff.

Such a list, sadly, proves absolutely nothing. Because it is just as easy to find examples of teams that began a winning streak by leaving out a talented but unreliable star player. The French team that won the World Cup in 1998 left out both David Ginola and Eric Cantona, just as the current side have now omitted Nasri.

In the popular imagination, the argument about dropping and recalling star players revolves around the juicy, gossipy questions: how difficult are they, how does their awkwardness manifest itself, has anyone tried to talk them round? This is naturally intriguing stuff. But the other half of the question - the crucial half - is too often ignored. Quite simply, how much better are they than the next guy?

	When mavericks slide from outright brilliance to mere high competence they find patience runs out alarmingly quickly. There is a lot of high competence around. It is replaceable. Not so genuine brilliance

If you are a lot better, it is amazing how forgiving sports teams can be. Luis Suarez was banned for eight games for racially abusing Patrice Evra. He then served another ten-match ban for biting a Chelsea player. Obviously Liverpool sacked him instantly on the grounds that he was bringing the club into disrepute and becoming a distraction from the task of winning football matches? No, they didn't do anything of the kind. They calculated that Suarez was the best chance, their only chance, of mounting a challenge for trophies. If Suarez had been Liverpool's sixth- or seventh-best player, rather than their star man, he would have been kicked out years ago.

In other words, the best protection from being dropped for being "difficult" is to be brilliant. Even as a young man, England midfielder Paul Gascoigne was a heavy drinker and an unreliable man. But he was a sensational footballer. Coaches put up with him because they calculated it was in their own and the team's rational self-interest. By the latter stages of his career, Gascoigne was still a heavy drinker and an unreliable man, but he was now only occasionally an excellent footballer. Glenn Hoddle felt Gascoigne was too unfit to play at the 1998 World Cup. The glass was half-empty.

When mavericks slide from outright brilliance to mere high competence they find patience runs out alarmingly quickly. There is a lot of high competence around. It is replaceable. Not so genuine brilliance. That is why Shane Warne was able to criticise Australia coach John Buchanan and (nearly) always stay in the team. Any rational man who asked himself the question: "Are Australia a better team with Warne in it?" came to the unavoidable conclusion: "Yes, definitely."

Here's the central point. At this exalted level of elite sport, a great number of players have an epic degree of self-belief. Being convinced of their own greatness is an aspect of their magic. They back themselves to shape the match, to determine its destiny - especially the big matches. Instead of seeing themselves as just one of a number of exceptionally talented players, in their own minds they are men apart, special cases.

They aren't always right, though. So the question becomes: how good, how difficult? They are two aspects of the same equation, a calculation that is being made every day by coaches all over the world - on the school pitch, in the reserves squad, all the way to the World Cup final.

A player, too, must make his own calculation. Would pretending to be someone else - a more compliant, easy-going man - centrally detract from my performances? Must I play on my own terms, behaving as I like? But this question must coexist with another, less comfortable one: am I good enough to get away with it?

Not many. Fewer, certainly, than the number who think they can.

Uefa and Michel Platini are missing the real targets with their £50 million fine for Manchester City

Paul Hayward in The Telegraph

When Abu Dhabi’s rulers first decided to build a bonfire of hundreds of millions of pounds at Manchester City they would have laughed at the idea that blowing money was a crime punishable by Uefa sanctions. Imagine that: a sport where they throw a £50 million penalty at you for excessive generosity.

Strictly, Financial Fair Play (FFP) is an anti-subsidy initiative by a game that prostrates itself to foreign billionaires and then ticks them off for investing too much. It defiles the World Cup by awarding it to Qatar, then disapproves of Qatari spending at Paris St-Germain.

It says little about rampant ticket price inflation, the huge sums extracted by agents or grotesque individual player salaries. Whichever way you turn it, Uefa’s clumsy lunge at “fairness” has ended up being about two gulf states who jumped into football as an act of future-proofing because their oil was running out.

No torch is being held here for sovereign wealth. But the distortion of the London house market by foreign speculators, for example, is a far more serious issue than City paying Sergio Agüero’s wages via a so-called sweetheart deal with Etihad Airways.

Uefa-ologists might have spotted that president Michel Platini enjoys a cosy relationship with Qatar, who chose Paris as their investment outlet, and that it might have been somewhat awkward for Europe’s governing body to punish PSG without also directing their disapproval at City. 

The clubs hit hardest by these arbitrary actions are those who had to spend heavily to raise underperforming clubs into the elite. City and PSG both fit this profile.

It was no surprise, then, to find Roman Abramovich broadly supportive of the FFP principle. Chelsea’s owner had already torched the kind of cash City and PSG have burned in the last three years. By endorsing the move to have such extravagance cast as a crime, Abramovich was simply blocking the way to new tycoons and therefore protecting his competitive advantage.

From Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi’s viewpoint, a £50 million fine doubtless leaves a kind of moral stain. It implies financial doping, or even cheating, with its suggestion that the £35 million-a-year Etihad deal was really a polite way to cook the books.

As with PSG and the Qatari tourist board (£167 million), Uefa clearly believe that the deal was inflated to allow one part of an oil-rich state to subsidise another. And they might be right.

Yet the people who struck those deals are unlikely to appreciate being singled out in an industry that is synonymous with creative accounting. If in doubt, consider the mess Barcelona got themselves into over Neymar.

Nobody wants an unregulated free for all, or illegality, or the crushing of the poor by the rich. But Uefa’s punishment of City takes no account of the direction in which the club is heading or the socially constructive investment in the Etihad Campus in a deprived part of Manchester. Shiekh Mansour and his entourage are not philanthropists, but nor does their spending fit the template of outright decadence.

So far all that expenditure has bought them one Premier League title and not much headway in Europe. There is no wholesale buying of trophies because the Premier League is too competitive to allow it. This season City have had to fight Liverpool and Chelsea for the championship. The seductive allure of FFP is that helps the poorer against the richer. All it might do in this case is to make Abu Dhabi resent being stigmatised and cause them to question Uefa’s motives. You can see the speech bubble now: “They take our money and then fine us for giving it to them?”

A much greater problem, certainly in England, is clubs being ram-raided by speculators who seek to suck money out, not put it in. Portsmouthand Birmingham City are just two examples of clubs that have been treated like lumps of meat on an “investment” menu.

Many of us would like to see regulation attack that issue before the Uefa bureaucracy drives through arbitrary penalties against a club (City) who are putting money in, rather than taking it out, however vulgar it might sometimes seem.

Where is the £50 million fine for the Glazers for servicing their debts from Manchester United’s revenues? On this evidence, FFP is mere grandstanding.

Understanding Risk - Risk explained to a sixteen year old

By Girish Menon

Risk is the consequence one has to suffer when the outcome of an event is not what you expected or have invested in.

For e.g. as a GCSE student you have invested in getting the grades required by the sixth form college that you wish to go to.

The GCSE exam therefore is the event.

From an individual's point of view this event has only two possible outcome viz. you get the grades or you don't.

Your investment is time, money and effort in order to get the desired outcome.

The risk is what you will have lost when despite all your investment you did not get the desired grades and hence you are not able to do what you had wanted to do.

From a mathematical point of view since there are only two possible outcomes one could say that the probability of either outcome is 0.5.

Your investment with spending time studying, taking tuitions, buying books.... are to lower the probability to failure to as low a figure as possible.

Can you lower the probability of failure to 0? Yes, by invoking the ceteris paribus assumption. If all 'other factors' that affect a student's ability to take an exam are constant, then a student who has studied all the topics and solved past papers will not fail.

Else, some or all the 'other factors' may conspire to bring about a result that the student may not desire. It is impossible to list all the 'other factors' and hence one is unable to control them. Hence, the exam performance of even a hitherto good student remains uncertain.

If the above example, with only two possible outcomes, shows the uncertainty and unpredictability  in the exam results of a diligent student then one shudders to think about other events where all the outcomes possible cannot be identified.

Let's move to study the English Premier League. Here, each team plays 38 matches and each match can have only three outcomes. When one considers picking a winner  of the league one could look at the teams, the manager etc. But, 'other factors' such as injury to key players, the referee...... may scupper the best laid plans.

When one looks at investing in the shares of a company one may study its books of accounts. Assuming that these books are accurate, this information may be inadequate because it is information from the past and the firm which made a huge killing last season may now be facing turbulent conditions of which you an outside investor maybe unaware of. The 'other factors' that may impinge on a firm's performance will include the behaviour of the staff inside the firm, behaviour of other firms, the government's policies and even global events.

Yet, as a risk underwriter one has to take into account all of these factors, quantify each factor based on its importance and likelihood of happening and then estimate the risk of failure. The key thing to remember is that the quantitative value that you have given each factor is at best only a rough estimate and could be wrong. Which is why every risk underwriter follows Keynes' dictum, 'When the facts change, I change my mind'. George Soros, the celebrated investor, has been rumoured to say no to an investment decision that he may have approved only a few hours ago.

Even if Keynes and Soros may have changed their minds on receipt of new information I am willing to bet that their investment record will show many wrong decisions.

So if the risk in investment decisions itself cannot be accurately predicted imagine the dilemma a politician makes when he decides to take his nation to war.

Hence the best way sportsmen, businessmen and politicians overcome the uncertainty of decision making is by posturing. Pretending that you are the best and everything is within your control. They hope that this will scare away the challengers and doubters and victory becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Alas! It unfortunately does not work every time either. 

(The author is a lecturer in economics.)

What is Religion

Part 1: civil religion and the state

The 'God' of American civil religion supplies a way for society to judge itself from a standpoint exterior to power

• 
• • Andrew Brown
  • theguardian.com, Monday 26 August 2013 10.00 BST

The recent death of Robert Bellah made me reread his classic essay on American civil religion, which first appeared in 1967 and this, in turn, sparked a series' worth of questions on what religion is. Bellah believed, as I have come to do, that a society without religion is impossible. This claim will strike quite a lot of readers as wholly absurd, as ridiculous as supposing that Earth goes round the sun when any fool can see the sun crossing the heavens several times at least in any English summer. So I think it's worth examining and defending at some length.

The first requirement, if you are going to do this, is to break all notions of religion as being something essentially like Christianity or any of the other monotheisms of today. To talk about "religion" as if the perfect form was modern Christianity is like talking about biology as if the perfect mammal was homo sapiens.

Bellah was a sociologist and to some extent an anthropologist too. He knew very well that there have been innumerable different forms of religion, and that counter-examples can be found for everything that is supposed to be distinctively religious. You don't need priests, holy books, or doctrines. You don't even need myths. All these are things which, once established, are hard to be rid of, because they reflect and help to constitute increasingly complex models of social organisation which will tend to replace more simple ones. But none of them are essential to a religion.

At the same time, it's important not to go too far in the other direction, and to suppose that every social activity, and every movement of the inner life, can be described as in some sense religious.

Bellah himself started off in the 70s with a long and complicated definition and ended up with a very simple and powerful one. This came in part from the early 20th-century philosopher George Santayana, who wrote that having a religion meant having "another world to live in – whether we expect ever to pass wholly over into it or not".

What Bellah added to this was the point that the world of everyday, from which religion promises to deliver us, is not more real, or less constructed than the one we access through religious practices. Everyday life may involve different kinds of cognition, but the world we see through its mechanisms is just as much the product of wish fulfilment as heaven might be. Only the appetites being satisfied in there are different.

And living entirely in the daily life world of those narrow appetites and immediate problems to solve is literally intolerable. No one can manage it all the time. He doesn't mean by this that religion speaks to our higher or more unselfish instincts. It needs to be taken for granted in these arguments that some forms of religion are almost entirely malign and lead to horror. But religion is also, importantly, selfless. Its atrocities derive from a higher cause. They offer the hope that things will be different.

How does this map on to his idea of an American civic religion, distinct from Christianity? Perhaps the most important point of his essay, easily overlooked, is that there has been from the very beginning of the Republic, he says, an American civil irreligion competing with the civil religion as a narrative and a general theory of the state and its people. Again, it is a characteristic of this thought that there are struggles rather than simplicities.

The struggle between civil religion and civil irreligion is also one between republicanism and liberalism as these were understood in the late 18th century. Republicanism, certainly as it was understood in the 18th century, depends utterly on religion, because a republic is built and maintained by its citizens in their interactions with each other. They have to subordinate themselves quite deliberately to a vision of a common good, and they must see this as fulfilling their own natures. That, very simply, is the task of religion. This is the spirit that he sees infuses the Declaration of Independence.

Against this is the competing tradition of liberalism, more fully developed in the constitution. Liberalism (in this sense) has no need of God because it trusts that the self-interest of the citizens will lead them to the best possible outcome: "the state is a purely neutral legal mechanism without purposes or values. Its sole function is to protect the rights of individuals, that is, to protect freedom." Such a state is, he thinks, an absurd impossibility, which could never exist (non-existence does not of course much diminish its power over our imaginations).

States and societies must have a way to judge themselves from some standpoint exterior to power. It is not enough for religion to give us access to another world: we must be able to contemplate our everyday world and judge it by the standards of the one we reach. And this judgment is what the "God" of American civil religion supplies. This God is clearly distinct from the Christian one, and still more the Jewish one. Rather he is the being who rescues, or who might sometimes rescue, America from the evil angels of its nature.

Whatever else you think of his ideas, this task is pressing today.

------

Part 2: why football doesn't measure up

The most blinding and obvious deficiency of football as a religion is that it lacks any kind of theology – and excludes many women

• 
• • Andrew Brown
  • theguardian.com, Monday 2 September 2013 09.02 BST

'For a lot of people the fate of their football team does affect them the way that God's good opinion is supposed to do.' Photograph: Carl Recine/Action Images

A perfectly reasonable question to ask of people like me, who define "religion" in a way that plays down theology, is why something like football should not be a religion. After all, it involves collective emotion, quasi-mystical experiences of loss of selfhood in a higher purpose, even if that is only to crush those bastards from the visiting team. IfNick Hornby's Fever Pitch is to be believed, it is also a way of coming to terms with the disappointments and tragedies of life. Going to a match with your estranged father has something of the effect that taking communion together is meant to have for Christians.

If you do a Google news search, in the months of an English winter, for terms like "miracle", or "messiah" many results will turn out to be about football matches. For a lot of people the fate of their football team does affect them the way that God's good opinion is supposed to do. All kinds of mental illness and unhappiness diminish when their team does well, and increase when it does badly. And then there is the Bill Shankly quote, that football isn't a matter of life or death, it's much more important than that: this, in itself, is a wonderful definition of the ambitions of religious truth – that it should be more important than life or death.

And yet football very clearly isn't a proper religion. And the reasons why cast some light on what religions are, or must be.

I should perhaps add here that I am completely unsympathetic to the game. I have only been to one serious football match (a north London derby) in my life, when I was accompanying a police patrol. We sat on the touchline, and came away with our shoulders coated with spittle because the people behind us were howling out their feelings without any inhibitions. I will watch football sometimes on screens because the movement is so completely meaningless. I suppose this is a vague equivalent to the homoerotic pleasures of liturgical traditionalists.

But I absolutely lack something which is obviously a deep part of the engagement of real football fans – the ability to suspend disbelief so that I feel I am in some way present on the pitch myself. The sale of replica shirts that is such an important part of the economics of modern football clearly depends on the idea that you take on some of the virtue of the player whose number you wear. That's clearly one of the mechanisms that makes up religions. But it's not enough on its own.

And this is important. Religions aren't made from specially "religious" behaviour or thoughts, but from ordinary patterns of thought and behaviour which are assembled in particular ways.

The most blinding and obvious deficiency of football as a religion is that it lacks any kind of theology. There is in fact an absurd public rhetoric embraced by Fifa about brotherhood but no one takes it seriously. Although theology is the least important part of any religious system, and the one which alters most in response to changes either in public ritual or in private emotion, it is needed as a way to make sense – to the participants – of what is going on.

I'm inclined to think that it is a further disadvantage that football matches have results. It really doesn't matter what football managers say in public compared to what their players do. Compare this to American civil religion, which could be identified, and analysed by Robert Bellah because he had texts to work with. He was able to point out, and to analyse, the implicit theologies of American public rhetoric, and the kinds of things that presidents said when they wanted to unite their country around a common purpose. If you were to do that to the speeches made by football managers, the results would be less rewarding. The Gettysburg Address was rather more than a half-time pep talk in the American civil war.

But all this is really rather theoretical. The real reason why football could never function as a religion is blindingly obvious – which is why we are blind to it. Many women find it boring and incomprehensible.

For the most part "serious" men's football is an escape from all the problems entailed by the existence of another sex. This has its charms, but it won't do at all for a religion, which has to offer sense and meaning and hope to the whole of life. If religions were only expressions of willed stupidity, willed escapism, and orgies of communal feeling, then, yes, football might be a religion. But since it isn't, there must be more to religions than that.

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part 3: the role of the ritual

Robert Bellah argues that religion is underpinned and preceded by ritual – but that does not make all ritual religious

'Acts such as staring at the sunset might be a root of some of our perceptions of the world as ineffable and infinitely valuable.' Photograph: David Bigwood / Alamy

If you treat religion as a natural phenomenon, as Robert Bellah did, two things follow. The first is that what we observe will not have clear or logical boundaries. This means that what constitutes a religion is really quite hard to specify even if it is fairly easy to recognise. The second point is that any of the social phenomena or psychological phenomena we are interested in will have a history. In some aspects this will be an evolutionary history. What we have will have developed from earlier forms, and the capacities we use will have evolved from earlier ones.

This is most obvious in the case of language. It's reasonable to say that there could be no religion without a language – reasonable, but hardly inarguable. A great many of the experiences we think of as quintessentially religious come without language, mystical ones in particular. (I know it is perfectly possible for an atheist to have mystical experiences and to shape their life around them while denying them any theological explanation. So it would clearly be wrong to say that mystical experiences enforce any particular religious position. That's not the point.)

Nonetheless, even wordless religious experiences are embedded in language. Animals without language might have proto-religious experiences, but these are clearly not the same as those which a linguistically competent human has. The primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh once described to me a line of chimpanzees staring in apparent bliss at a sunset – something which might be a root of some of our perceptions of the world as ineffable and infinitely valuable. But the chimpanzees will never tell stories about it, and never try to embed the experience in a web of explicit meanings. Both of those things must form part of any religious experience.

So the emergence of language must have preceded the emergence of religion. Bellah, however, moved towards the view that ritual preceded both, and made both possible. This is a very large claim for ritual. It is made in compressed form in the big bookReligion in Human Evolution, and in an earlier, more spacious way in the paper Durkheim and Ritual, reprinted in the Robert Bellah reader.

Essentially, he argues that shared attention directed through repetitive and stereotyped actions is the essence of ritual, and that it is also at the root of all human learning, including the transactions between a mother and her baby. This makes a lot of sense when you consider the extraordinarily ritualised proto-language that we use when communicating with babies. When practised between two people, ritual and play give rise to love, whether sexual, parental, or simply between friends. When practised in larger groups, ritual and play give us religion and language.

This is a very compressed version of the argument. I have for instance entirely left out his speculations on the importance of music in the process, although they are also relevant to language acquisition, as anyone who talks to toddlers will tell you. But it carries the minimum we need to understand his approach to the question of what religion is.

Talking about the importance of ritual in this way is frequently attacked as a way to defend the relevance of religion in a world where it is (or merely ought to be) irrelevant. It looks like special pleading. Passages such as this: "Since ritual, for Durkheim, is primarily about the sacred in a sense in which the religious and the social are almost interchangeable, subsequent work … might be seen as disclosing an element of the sacred, and thus of the religious, at the very basis of social action of any kind," lend strength to the suspicion that this is just a way to make sociologists look as if they had the key to all mythologies, something no other scientists, of course, would ever do.

But the suspicion is importantly misplaced. To show that the earliest religions arise from the same processes as the ritual capabilities which make us distinctively human, is not an argument that everything which subsequently evolved using those capabilities must be religious.

The sense in which Bellah's claim seems to me really important, as well as quite right, is that it undercuts the idea that there is a special "religious" mode of irrationality – a mind virus, if you will – that could be eradicated and leave the rest of our humanity intact and purified. On the contrary, if you could remove the roots of religion, you remove the roots of humanity, too. Ritual and narrative are the basic ways by which we learn what it is to be human, and I don't think it's grotesque imperialism to regard arguments about which rituals and narratives are truly religious ones – whether or not their conclusions are atheistic.

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part 4: divinity, God and 'real' religion

Can you have a religion not based around the Abrahamic idea of a God who could, if he wished, behave like a mafia boss?

• 
• • Andrew Brown
  • theguardian.com, Monday 16 September 2013 09.00 BST

Thai men take part in a mass meditation ceremony. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features

One of the most unnerving passages in Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution is the section where he examines the central Jewish and Christian idea of a covenant with God. He traces it back to the treaties imposed by the remarkably brutal Assyrian empire on the nations it subjugated.

Some of the treaties have been preserved, so that it is possible to compare the language with that of the Bible. It turns out that the language in which God addresses Israel is almost identical to the language with which the Assyrians address the rulers they have suffered to remain in the states they would otherwise devastate. The nearest modern analogy would perhaps be for some tiny Baltic state like Estonia to model its understanding of God on Stalin. In both cases, there is a fundamental asymmetry of power: the weaker party is bound and compelled to obedience and even to love. The stronger party is entirely untrammelled.

"In both Assyrian and Israelite versions of the vassal covenant the subordinate must keep the stipulations of the treaty or face the most disastrous consequences: in Israel God, in Assyria the gods, will inflict leprosy, blindness, violent death, rape, and invasion by 'a nation you have not known' if the subordinate is disloyal."

Two questions arise from this. The first is whether this isn't just a really powerful argument for atheism – it looks as if the central idea of God's chosen people has nothing to do with revelation and is more a kind of wish-fulfilment arising from an abusive relationship. There is a counter-argument sketched out in Bellah's book, which I don't want to go into here because to enter into it would move away from the central question of what a religion is.

That demands that we ask the second question – whether there could be religions that were not based around the Abrahamic idea of a God who could, if he wished, behave like a mafia boss: the being Blake called "Old Nobodaddy".

I am writing this at a meeting of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion, which has been discussing atheisms. The plural is important, because one of the arguments here is that both religion and atheism are socially constituted. If you complicate the definition of religion, you also constitute the definitions of atheism, yet both complications are forced on us by the variety and inventiveness of human societies.

It is almost universally true that what counts as religion in one society at one time will be atheistic in another, and vice versa. Both Socrates and the early Christians were persecuted as atheists, yet its obvious that both lived in a world filled with spirits. Equally, most people are atheists with regard to most gods.

Even strict naturalists will claim to have transcendent experiences. Some will claim this with peculiar fervour, as if they wanted to show that atheists lost nothing by abandoning God. So it's perfectly possible, even if uncommon, to be a strict naturalist and Buddhist (I think Susan Blackmore would qualify as an example) and, clearly, Buddhism is generally classed as a religion.

So let's sharpen the question to whether it is possible to have a conception of the divine that does not involve any kind of personal God, or God having any kind of personal relationship with the believer.

Such a set of beliefs would be largely inarticulate. There might be a kind of intellectual superstructure – as there is in Buddhism – but a worked-out theology would be unnecessary especially if the main structure of religious participation was built around rituals and practices rather than creeds. In some forms of eastern religion, the only words required of a believer are mantras that are quite deliberately meaningless, or rapidly become so with repetition.

This does seem to me to be an almost entirely depersonalised picture of something otherworldly, whether we call it the divine, the transcendent, or the ultimately real. Whatever it is called it triumphantly fulfils Bellah's criterion that religion should show us another world and allow us to criticise and better understand this one from the other's perspective.

Of course, much of Buddhism isn't like this. You might argue that the deracinated Buddhism of western intellectuals isn't a real religion just as some antitheists argue that the beliefs of philosophically sophisticated Christian theologians aren't "real" Christianity. But I don't think this argument holds for a religion like Buddhism, which has no founding covenant. It can't be wrong to defy the intentions of a non-existent God. But it can be a very religious act.
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How are religions born?

What is religion, part 5: In the systems we know about, either folk beliefs coalesce or a charismatic founder emerges

• 
• • Andrew Brown
  • theguardian.com, Monday 23 September 2013 09.00 BST

Spanish soldiers in Malaga carry a statue of Christ during a holy week procession. Photograph: Jorge Guerrero/AFP/Getty Images

Since they are historical entities, religions are born and die. I'll think about their death some other time. But how do they emerge, and from what? This isn't a question with a single answer, although there are a couple of popular stories about the process left over from the 19th century.

It's widely believed, for example, either that religions must have a charismatic founder, a prophet figure, or that they are more or less self-conscious frauds perpetrated by a priestly class against the common people. This second version is clearly a secularised version of the Protestant history of the Reformation, and makes very little sense as a general theory. Obviously there have been examples of both types of religion formation. It's possible that Mormonism combines both, since a charismatic founder managed to create a social structure with huge rewards for the priesthood. But there are too many exceptions for these rules to be generally valid.

Robert Bellah's account of the emergence of religion might be said to break off just at the point when it becomes easy to talk about the emergence and existence of particular religions, distinguished clearly from other forms of social activity. The very earliest religions are, in Bellah's telling, indistinguishable from culture. He follows Emile Durkheim and most anthropologists in seeing "religion" as an intensification of ritual first of all. The things that everyone in the tribe does together, and the stories they tell together become their religion – or at least what anthropologists could study and classify as religion.

It's not at all clear that the people studied by anthropologists would understand this distinction. They certainly don't understand it theologically. There is a good attack on these kinds of misunderstandings in Pascal Boyer's book The Naturalness of Religious Ideas, in which he points out that most anthropological accounts of "primitive beliefs" refer to something that does not actually exist: "They [are not] thoughts that occur to actual people; they describe thoughts that people might entertain, in the anthropologist's view, if they wanted to make sense of what they actually do and say."

Bellah, with his stress on ritual and on the embodiment of beliefs in wider systems of meaning, avoids this pitfall. You make sense of what you do and say by acting on it, and embodying it in a larger narrative, not by extracting it into a system.

Yet systems do emerge, and they form a large part of what we now think of as religion. Although some form of healing ritual, and healing specialist, seems to have been among the very earliest precursors of religion, and of priesthood, the emergence of any kind of "religion" organisationally distinct from the rest of culture depends at the very least on agriculture, which provides enough of a surplus in fixed settlements.

It seems certain that religions, like other social forms, evolve: that is to say they arise from modifications of earlier forms. The trouble for historical inquiry is simply that without written records we simply have to guess what happened. With written records, we need no longer guess, but can be authoritatively misled. Two excellent accounts of this process are Tom Holland's book In the Shadow of the Sword, about the invention of Islam, and Jim Macdonald's blogpost on the emergence of the Bible as fan fiction.

In those religious systems we know about, there seem to be two processes under way. The first is a kind of coalescence of folk beliefs and practices into something more or less organised and more or less useful to the state. Shinto looks like that, and Hinduism. You could make a case that American Protestantism, which has increasingly less to do with historic, Orthodox Christianity, is heading in the other direction.

Then there are the religions that can be traced back to a single charismatic founder – most obviously Christianity and Islam, but also Sikhism and Mormonism, to name two modern successes.

In all these cases, there is considerable doubt about the relation of the teacher to the teaching subsequently encoded in their name (as with Marx and Marxism), but it does seem that the idea of the perfect teacher helps to spread teachings. The best illustration of that is Judaism, which seems to have been a coalescence or codification – with considerable distortions – of a folk religion recollected in exile, but which was codified around the almost entirely invented figure of Moses.

It seems intuitively obvious that in the modern world, where people must make a self-conscious choice of religion or belief system, a charismatic founder figure who can say "follow me" is necessary. But like many things intuitively obvious, this is wrong. Even today, the most interesting religious movements are those that coalesce without a single founder or a body of organised doctrine – Rastafarianism is a small example, charismatic Christianity a much more important one. There are still religions being born that will change the world.