To be sure, this type of usage is far from strictly modern. St Augustine’s fifth-century masterpiece, City of God, was premised on the idea that the saved are ‘citi- zens of the heavenly City,’ rather than simply citizens of earthly cities or indeed of ‘the world community’. Today this sort of deployment of the term ‘citizenship’ is still often understood to be at least partly metaphorical, as it was in Augustine’s for- mulation.