Loyalty to your team

I first went to watch a Leeds United football match in 1969. I followed their game last night just as avidly (we won!). I have therefore been following this team for 55 years. I know people who have been following their team for much longer, whether it is football, the other football, cricket, baseball or even a national team. 

In this post I want to talk and think about the various kinds of loyalty that exist in different areas of our lives and whether you can ever end that loyalty or even switch it. 

First off, I think that in matters of football, you absolutely can't switch. If you have followed a historically lowly team in your leagues, then that is still great, and maybe even greater than the loyalty that people feel to a traditionally top team like Manchester United, say, or the Dallas Cowboys. If you follow Tranmere, or Darlington or Port Vale my admiration for you is higher. And I dare say your satisfaction across the board is possibly higher, despite very little traditional success. It might be that the high-point of any season will be beating your traditional local rival. But the idea of switching your allegiance is hugely frowned on in the UK at least. You are a 'glory hunter' or a 'part-time supporter' who cannot deal with defeat. If you are a Leeds fan, you have to be able to deal with defeat. Ask fans of any other clubs. But there is a grudging, though very clear, respect for passionate loyal support within the UK football ecosystem. You might hate Leeds fans or Blades fans or Pompey fans, but when they turn up in large numbers and sing their hearts out, you invisibly tip your hat to them. 

Now in some other areas of our lives, I think loyalty is a different thing. I would start, I hope not too controversially, with religion. I remember someone noting how strange it was that a divine deity would make 90% of religiously observant people choose the particular religion of their parents, even thought there were several different religions to choose from. 

And if we look at how religion is passed on we do observe that huge amounts of culture and history are involved, as well as the apparent tenets of the religion in question. Even the great milestones of our lives - births, marriages, deaths - are almost always accompanied by some religious element. Also, it is clear that many of the acclaimed virtues, such as care, humility and charity, are shared by most religions. 

Loyalty to your religion is viewed in different ways in different times and places. It seems that under the Roman empire it was generally OK to keep your old religion as long as you also made a nod to the religion that saw the Emperor as a god (in the times when it did). So the pressures on loyalty (to either religion) were not great, and there was tolerance for you to bow to a couple of gods. But at other times in our histories, loyalty to your religion has become a killing matter (and a martyring matter at that) and even now there are places where stopping following your religion is seen as 'apostasy' and very serious. There are also particular sects which will shun you if you do not continue following your religion. 

So is it wrong to lose your faith, or to decide it is not what you now (or even ever) believed? I personally don't think it is, on the simple argument that if your God sees you, they must grant that you are not a puppet and have some version of what we think of as 'free will'. You also do not have to become antagonistic towards your parents' religion, just because you no longer believe. You can surely respect someone else's belief without sharing it.

Which brings me, I hope less controversially, to political loyalty. Most Western countries have a couple of dominant political parties (though a lot of countries have a wider range with no 'duopoly'). In somewhere like the UK there was historically a loyalty to either the red or blue party which was for many people lifelong and intransigent. You will even hear people say, even now, "Oh I could never be friends with/go out with/like someone from the (Red/Blue) party". I think something similar may be happening for my friends in the USA.

Now I understand that for all political organisation you need to get a bit of scale to have an effect. Whether you are a trade union, a political party or a group of insurgents, you have to bring together people who actually have different opinions but share enough objectives to work together. But even given that, why do you have to sacrifice your own beliefs or morals to the random political vagaries of a party? Surely if it goes far away enough from you, it is no longer worth your loyalty (and another party may, or there may be no real home for you).

And finally, if, as I believe, you can shift your loyalties in certain areas, what are the things that you should be steadfast in (apart from football teams, which are a given but which are also (whisper it quietly) not actually important)?

Not to be too Sopranos about this, but I believe you should be loyal to your family and relatives. Even if you end up visiting them in prison, you can't just dump them. The loose patchwork/raft of a family is hugely important to you when things go wrong, as well as when things go very right. You celebrate with them, mourn with them, and I believe you should always 'be there for them', in that hateful touchy-feely phrase. But still, you should. I think you could well add your close friends as a sort of annexed family and spread that iron loyalty to them too.

And most importantly, whether you think these exist or not, you should be loyal to your own sense of what is right. People seem to think that religion or education provides this, but they are wrong. A four-year-old has a good sense of what is right and wrong. People only lose it when they push it away or press it down. But loyalty to your principles and sense of what you know is right is the one loyalty that makes us deserve our place in this world.