ABSTRACT
In her collection of essays on sex and citizenship, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, Lauren Berlant asks this question, ‘Are naïve infantile citizenship and paralysed cynical apathy the only positions a normal or moral American can assume?’ (1997: 29). On reading Berlant's book I was struck by how those two positions could be descriptive of contemporary attitudes to the Bible. Despite being the most prescriptive single text in the formation of western and colonial politics and culture, nowadays it is ignored by the majority who allow it no conscious impact on their lives. But for the minority for whom it remains their constant guide through life, it attracts total commitment in defiance of its primitive world-view and archaic laws. Furthermore, Berlant's term, ‘infantile citizenship’, resonates with the consistent imperative evident across the many and varied texts of Bible itself, and that is the call for childlike obedience in recognition of the omnipotence of the parent. In contrast to Berlant's study, in my analysis of citizenship within the theocracies of biblical imagination, God replaces George Washington as the benevolent patriarch and the boundaries of the nation are cosmic.
