Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (review)

While I was reading Julia Reinhard Lupton's Citizen-Saints, it happened that my husband became a U.S. citizen. The mandatory naturalization ceremony was an ideological extravaganza. The ceremony, held in Philadelphia, opened with a presentation of the colors by an elderly contingent from the Sons of the American Revolution, decked out in revolutionary garb. A retired army officer spoke of his own descent from early English settlers, telling the immigrants (primarily of African or Asian origin, as far as I could see) that they were now "one of us." The main speaker was a survivor of the Holocaust. His inspirational message: be sure to see Las Vegas before you die. Then there was a speech about how immigrants to the United States flee a life of oppression, violence, and tyranny in their native lands, followed by a list of all the countries of origin represented in the waiting crowd, presumably illustrating those hostile places: the list, to be sure, included Sierra Leone and Sudan, but also Sweden, Switzerland, and Canada. As the event drew to a close, huge screens featured a blessing from George W. Bush and a video of the great national parks accompanied by country-western music. The American-born, middle-aged man sitting next to me wept openly.

The height of the ceremony came when the assembled immigrants—many of whom were wearing clothing that indicated the ethnic or religious affiliations of their homelands—took a collective oath essentially vowing to abjure their country of birth. The overall effect, at least for me, was poignant, as narratives of loss and violence overwhelmed those of new belonging. The ceremony in many ways dramatized the analysis of citizenship that Lupton provides here. In their act of renunciation, the newly minted U.S. nationals became what Lupton terms "citizen-saints," individuals who "mortif[y their] previous tribal and local ties, [their] native particularism, in favor of naturalization and conversion to a general economy" (63). As Lupton notes, citizenship comes at a cost: "From their earliest formulations, citizenship rites come into being by exacting some cancellation, sacrifice, or mortification of prior familial, regional, or cultic allegiances" (76). This sacrifice is a necessary condition of "modern models of citizenship [which] tend to imagine citizenship as one large circle containing a capacious set of inhabitants within it" (77).

If hegemonic citizenship is the foundation of modern conceptions of liberal democracy, this foundation is built upon the shifting sands of multiple group identifications. Lupton's exciting book is fundamentally a study in how membership in competing groups can complicate the premise of liberalism. Her interest is "in theological conceptions of national and ethnic belonging and their imperfect translations into modern forms of civil society, racial theory, and national membership" (12). Imperfection is key: Lupton's citizen-saint is "caught between competing, mutually exclusive, social, political, and religious structures" (13). The consequences of this in-between-ness constitute the focus of the book:

In seeking social recognition within the inherently insufficient regime of citizenship, these deeply particularized characters [Antigone, Barabas, Shylock, Othello, Isabella, Caliban, and Milton's Samson] are not subsumed within a greater collective whole (Hegel's view of citizenship in relation to civil society), but rather are de-completed, not fully taken up in the local and general memberships that continue to define them, and hence secure a measure of subjective freedom in relation to the several circles they inhabit.

(211)

Reading this notion back into the naturalization ceremony, the idea that there is "one" of "us" is a blatantly transparent fantasy that even scenes of Grand Canyon sunsets cannot mask, but the imperfect nature of liberal citizenship enables civil society and creates the citizen.

While she relies upon classical models of citizenship, Lupton's primary point of departure is Paul's construction of citizenship in the New Testament. The first chapter traces how Paul negotiated the religious, social, and legal systems of his three distinct citizen groups (Tarsus, Rome, and Israel). A...