If Christianity has whiteness at its heart, then where do nonwhites belong? Baldwin himself wondered, since, in his day, God and Jesus both were white, and he was not. “The blood of the Lamb had not cleansed me in any way whatsoever,” Baldwin lamented about his time in the Black church. “I was just as black as I had been the day I was born.”40 Ultimately he could not be part of an American Christianity that elevated white heterosexual men,
