The World Cup as Global Civil Religion

I'm having a blast right now! In case you haven't been watching ESPN or listening to the news, the World Cup soccer tournament is on every day--a feast of top-class matches every day. I've been tracking the progress of my favorite teams pretty closely (Go USA! Go Netherlands!), but that's gotten me thinking about how to link this crazy passion to the larger question of globalization.

And then, this morning, it hit me: The World Cup is a practice of a growing global civil religion. By "civil religion" I mean what Robert Bellah meant in his classic article of 1967, "Civil Religion in America": "a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity." While Bellah originally drew attention to beliefs, symbols, and rituals in the American political system, he ended this classic article by speculating about the possibility of a "world civil religion," which he thought might be institutionalized in something like the United Nations.

But, like sociologist Frank Lechner (in chapter 3 of his book Globalization), I'm convinced that world soccer tournaments like the World Cup, more than the United Nations, are helping to contribute to what Manfred Steger calls a "global imaginary."
What I mean is that the beliefs, symbols, and rituals of the World Cup contribute to our imagination of ourselves as global people. The every-four-year ritual of this soccer tournament, like the Olympics, helps to construct the image of the whole world assembled together. It enacts a series of liturgical practices that help to institutionalize a global consciousness.

Even as it does this, however, it also inscribes beliefs in nationalistic exclusion. National teams do battle on the field in their traditional colors and war-like pride inevitably accompanies the defeat of a bitter foe. Ask any serious U.S. national soccer team fan their opinions of Mexico or Italy, and you'll get a taste of this.

Even a serious globalist who tries to avoid obnoxious flag-waving, like me, will express distaste for these other teams. So I'm not sure that a global imaginary, with its own practices of civil religion legitimating it, automatically implies multinational harmony. It seems to thrive on nationalism, rather than eliminate it. It may create conflict, rather than reduce it.

While I'm not ready to abandon watching the Cup, I'm pondering how my participation in this civil religion could compromise my prior commitments to the Church's liturgy. Is it just a matter of "balance," or can participating in such practices get in the way of truer and deeper loyalties? Does God want me to turn off ESPN? Would Jesus watch the World Cup?

China vs. Slovenia

As World Cup fever sets in for soccer fans like me, the contrast between China and Slovenia suggested itself. As the Washington Post reports today, China is the world's most populous country, but it doesn't have a national team at the 32-team World Cup tournament, which starts next Friday, June 11, in South Africa. Meanwhile, as ESPN reports, Slovenia (pop. 2 million) beat Russia (pop. 141 million), to qualify for the Cup. Clearly, population size is not destiny.

Which means that the U.S. (pop. 300 million) had better not overlook Slovenia when they play on June 18. The smallest country teams are often called minnows or giant-killers, and the U.S. whale/Goliath needs to play well -- or else it'll join China and Russia on the sidelines.

Thomas Friedman's Lesson from Greece

Today's New York Times has an interesting column by Thomas Friedman on the public finance mess in Greece, which is worthy of comment--unlike much of Friedman's recent columns, which tend to be shrill rants about our feckless domestic politicians. (When Friedman sticks to globalization, he tends to do best.) Today's piece has a nice description of how globalization connects people so much that it requires us to be more ethical. If globalization really does make the world into a village, then our actions have impacts on people on the other side of the earth. People in Asia or Africa or Latin America or Europe are my neighbors.


As Friedman puts it,

. . . we’ll all need to be guided by the simple credo of the global nature-preservation group Conservation International, and that is: “Lost there, felt here.”

Conservation International coined that phrase to remind us that our natural world and climate constitute a tightly integrated system, and when species, forests and ocean life are depleted in one region, their loss will eventually be felt in another. And what is true for Mother Nature is true for markets and societies. When Greeks binge and rack up billions of euros of debt, Germans have to dig into their mattresses and bail them out because they are all connected in the European Union. Lost in Athens, felt in Berlin. Lost on Wall Street, felt in Iceland.

While it's possible to exaggerate these global connections, it's impossible to ignore them. When the Greek government's finances started going south, the impact was felt in the U.S. stock markets.


Such interdependence, in Friedman's view, requires ethical action by everyone. But how do we promote that?

How do we get more people behaving sustainably in the market and Mother Nature? That is a leadership and educational challenge. Regulations are imposed — values are inspired, celebrated and championed. They have to come from moms and dads, teachers and preachers, presidents and thought leaders. If there is another way, please write me. I’ll leave a note for Lydia.

"Lydia" is the name of a 10-year old Greek girl who left a note outside the bank building firebombed during protests against austerity measures imposed by the Greek government. The note said, “In what kind of a world will I grow up?"

Great question. But I don't think "values" instilled in individuals are the solution. Instead, I argue in the book that the practice of the church year helps to build a community--the church--that can model practical and hopeful alternatives to the current system of globalization.

A Review

After my lovely wife said that she had Googled the book title and came across a bunch of hits, I decided to try it, too. And I was pleased to discover a review posted on the website of Conrad Grebel College, University of Waterloo (Canada), by a reviewer that I don't know, Arthur Boers. I was even more pleased that Boers figured out the main message I was trying to convey in this book. As he put it,

I have considerable interest in both of this author’s foci – the shape of how we live today as it is affected by economic and political forces, and how we honor Christian traditions of time. Yet to date I have not seen anything that compares with this book in putting those two spheres in conversation.

This volume may well convince you that things are worse than they seem at first blush, but at the same time it offers us imaginative and hopeful ways forward.

Yup, that's the point.

Interview on WBGU 88.1

Not too long ago, I chatted for almost an hour about my book on the radio with a heavy metal DJ whose on-air name is Mean Metal X. An edited version of the interview is available by clicking here and then hitting the play button. Thanks to former student and now-friend, Ian Deters. Rock on!

Child Labor, Soccer Balls, and Pakistan

The German magazine Der Spiegel has an interesting story on the effects of banning of child labor in the city of Sialkot, Pakistan--where many of the world's soccer balls are stitched together by hand. This passage highlights the complexities of the globalization of labor:

Parents now send their children to the brickworks and into metalworking companies where no one is worried about corporate image. The families need the money to survive. The local sports companies are aware of what's happened but they want to fulfil the wishes of their Western customers. After all, the people who spend a lot of money on footballs want to do so with a clear conscience. The customer in a sports retail outlet doesn't realize that young girls are now hauling bricks right next door to Danayal, the stitching factory.
"Ten or 12-year-olds were well off here," says one manager who asked not to be named. "They learned a trade here that secured them an income for life. Now we're having trouble finding new stitchers."

So banning child labor from the soccer ball trade gives us a clean conscience but fails to eliminate the problem? Do we give up trying to change things? Is there no alternative? These are the sorts of questions that a story like this raises. My argument (in chapter 5 of the book) is that the problems go even deeper -- to the idea that we divide work up globally and split up labor into pieces -- and that the solutions must be more than the simple idea of banning products produced under harsh conditions.

Why Rankings Only Tell You So Much

Well, it turns out that those of us living in Canton, Ohio are living in the 9th most miserable city in the U.S., according to Forbes magazine. While there is no denying that we are far from being an urban paradise, it's sad that such rankings might turn people away from a community that has actually been on the upswing. For example, we've had a revival of interest in new downtown restaurants and art galleries here. The Joseph Saxton Gallery has a world-class collection of prints from world-famous photographers, right here in Canton.

Their methodology

takes into account unemployment, taxes (both sales and income), commute times, violent crime and how its pro sports teams have fared over the past two years. We also factored in two indexes put together by Portland, Ore., researcher Bert Sperling that gauge weather and Superfund pollution sites. Lastly we considered corruption based on convictions of public officials in each area as tracked by the Public Integrity Section of the U.S. Department of Justice (Forbes.com).

Which means that the list is dominated by cities in the upper Midwest and Northeast regions, i.e., the Rust Belt, since we all have cold weather and high unemployment, due to manufacturing jobs leaving our areas. Northeast Ohio is further harmed by corruption and poor sports teams. At least Canton has low crime and short commuting times. New York and Chicago are also on the list, but they are considered highly desirable places to live.

In the end, we love living in Canton, and are growing more attached to the place every day.