Baldwin spent his adult life consciously separating himself from institutional Christianity. He witnessed the ways that both the white church and the Black church failed the faithful and the world. As Baldwin said on The Dick Cavett Show, it meant that he couldn’t afford to trust most white Christians, or to trust the Christian church, which, as he says in No Name in the Street, “has betrayed and dishonored [their] Savior.... The Christians do not believe in their Savior (who has certainly failed to save them).”12 But given the many religious references and symbols in his work, given the
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