After Virtue At The SCG

Dear St Andrew’s,

What exactly are we angry about?

That is the excellent question asked by sports journalist Rana Hussain in response to the scandal that has engulfed the Sydney Swans. Five players have been suspended for the remainder of the season after a late-night gathering in a Melbourne hotel. A police investigation into an alleged sexual assault continues, but, at the time of writing, no player has been charged, and the club’s sanctions were imposed for breaches of its standards, independently of that investigation.

We must therefore resist speculating about matters we do not know. But Hussain asks a perceptive question: if no criminal charges are ultimately laid, will that mean nothing seriously wrong happened? If not, can we explain what was wrong?

Apparently, many of us are struggling.

Perhaps we are outraged because the players let down their teammates at the most important point of the season. Perhaps it was the heavy drinking, the sexualisation of women, or the brazenness of bringing the whole gathering back to the team hotel. Perhaps it was hypocrisy.

After all, the Swans have long presented themselves as having an exceptional culture. Journalist Jonathan Horn describes how “Bloods Culture” – selflessness, discipline and outstanding character – became central not only to the club’s sporting identity but also to its marketability. Its personable, talented and supposedly squeaky-clean players became valuable brands.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with that. But brand values must mean more than slogans on butcher’s paper, a way of securing sponsorship or selling additional memberships. You cannot monetise people’s character when it is attractive and then declare character irrelevant when it becomes inconvenient.

Our difficulty explaining all this might not be accidental. In his influential 1981 book After Virtue, the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued that Western society still uses moral language while having largely lost the framework that once gave that language meaning.

We say, “That’s wrong,” but often mean little more than, “That makes me feel angry.” MacIntyre called this emotivism: moral judgements becoming expressions of personal preference. We retain fragments of words such as “values”, “rights”, “justice” and “character”, but disagree about their foundations. Most importantly, we have lost a shared sense of our telos – the purpose for which human beings exist. Without an agreed destination, it becomes surprisingly difficult to say whether we are travelling in the right direction.

Perhaps we really are living in an “after virtue” society.

The Christian faith offers an answer to each of these problems. Goodness is not simply whatever I, or the majority, feel strongly about. It is grounded in the character of the God who made us. Human life has a purpose: we were created to know God, love him and our neighbour, and increasingly reflect the character of Jesus. And words such as love, dignity, justice, repentance and forgiveness belong within the great biblical story of creation, fall, redemption and renewal.

Values become virtues only when they shape our character – when they move from the shirt on our backs into the habits of our hearts and lives. As we saw last week, our repeated choices form tracks along which our lives increasingly run.

The Swans plainly have significant work to do in rebuilding trust and changing their culture. But before we congratulate ourselves on possessing better values, the public, and that includes us, also has some soul-searching to do. Outrage can be another way of examining everyone’s heart except our own.

By coincidence, or possibly providence, the next sermon in our series The Seven: From Vice to Virtue is “From Pride to Humility”. The five suspended Swans players could do worse than joining us at St Andrew’s this Sunday.

But then, so could the rest of us.

Many blessings,