society have evolved only in an external way; internally-spiritually-they are much as they always were, with the minority race (whether of color or ethnic origin) feeling spiritually disenfranchised from the larger society. This is clear in a book by the late James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, which concerns the religious experiences in America of a young black man who had been born in the United States. It is equally clear, although seen through a different fictional 'window,' in Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut. Bluebeard concerns what might be termed ethnicity rather than race, for the issues of inequality and a spiritual Diaspora are explored in that book through the character of an Armenian concentration camp survivor looking, through his artwork, for the same sort of spiritual explanations Baldwin's character seeks through religion. In both case, the quest is spiritual. .

             Baldwin's spiritual journey .

             Baldwin himself, no less than his characters, has experienced a disappointing spiritual journey as a black man in white America (Horn, 2004). One of Baldwin's biographers notes that Baldwin's own "black holiness" upbringing was limited, but was, nonetheless, representative of the ways black people encountered Christianity. That encounter was viewed as flawed (Hardy, 2003) despite the fact that it led to the creation of Afro-Protestantism, widely accepted as an attempt to encompass American culture and society within the black experience (Hardy, 2003).

             It seems that Baldwin was only too painfully aware of the sort of Catch-22 that was a hallmark of Vonnegut's work. For the black people in The Fire Next Time, although the black holiness tradition seemed to offer hope through a sense of spiritual power, in fact, it actually "furthered the myths and racist attitudes that denied any real hope of salvation for African Americans" (Hardy, 2003, p. 41).

             Using The Fire Next Time and a selection of other Baldwin works, Hardy "traces Christianity's role in 'African disfigurement' and in the promotion of the false consciousness of a white religion (Hardy, 2003, x-xi).