Supporters inherit a club as believers inherit a faith, and neither simply chooses another

The argument

A second argument turns from form to the manner in which the allegiance is held. Proponents observe that fandom is not a preference of the kind consumers exercise. A person does not compare clubs on their merits and select the strongest; the club arrives through a parent, a street or a town, usually before the age of reason, and thereafter cannot be exchanged. A supporter whose team is poor does not switch, and one who did switch would be thought by others to have done something shameful rather than something sensible. This, proponents argue, is exactly the grammar of inherited religion and nothing like the grammar of taste. The comparison extends to what the allegiance does inside a life. It supplies an answer to who a person is that does not depend on their success or failure in anything else. It creates obligations felt as obligations: to attend, to travel, to keep faith through a bad season, to teach it to a child. It provides a community of strangers who are owed something simply for sharing it. It gives the week a rhythm and the year a shape, and it offers, in defeat, a practised language of endurance and hope deferred. Proponents conclude that a commitment acquired by inheritance rather than choice, held unconditionally rather than on merit, binding its holder to duties and to a community, and furnishing both identity and consolation, is being described twice over when it is called fandom and also called something other than a religion. The thing itself, on this view, is a religion in the one sense that matters to the person living inside it.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Opponents answer that unchosen, unconditional, identity-giving loyalties are ordinary features of social life rather than marks of religion. Family, nation, language and regional pride are all inherited, all held unconditionally, all a source of duty and consolation, and none of them is a religion. If the argument worked it would make a religion of everything a person did not choose and will not abandon, which drains the word of content and explains nothing about either fandom or faith.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Supporters do change clubs, and people move cities and adopt the local team with no sense of apostasy. The unconditional loyalty described is an ideal held up within fandom rather than an account of how it is practised. [Rejecting P2] The obligations are social rather than binding. Nothing follows for a supporter who stops attending except that other supporters think less of them, which is true of any club or pastime and distinguishes none of them as a religion. [Rejecting C] Functioning as a religion does in some respects is not being one. The conclusion slides from a list of shared effects to an identity, and the effects listed are shared by nationality, family and regional pride as well.