Pastor entered race after activists challenged him to pray
The Rev Dr Frederick Douglass Haynes III, 65, spent four decades as senior pastor of Friendship-West Baptist Church, a progressive megachurch in Dallas, insisting he would not seek office. When Jasmine Crockett vacated her House seat in Texas’s 30th congressional district to run — unsuccessfully — for the US Senate, young progressive activists urged him to run. He initially declined. The turning point came last December, a week before the filing deadline, when activists challenged him on theological grounds: he had offered political excuses but had not prayed about it. “I find that ironic,” Haynes said, “that they would challenge a pastor to pray!”
After consulting the Georgia senator and pastor Raphael Warnock, Haynes said the challenge became a call: “In one of my prayer times I felt the spirit saying to me, ‘You’ve been talking a lot of smack from the outside, now you have a chance to do something significant on the inside: it’s time to step up.’” He added that he has always seen himself, in the language of Jesse Jackson, “as a tree shaker and not a jelly maker” — someone who works to make a difference from the outside, with those on the inside.
The campaign voice is on full display at Democratic gatherings. At last month’s Opal Lee empowerment gala in Fort Worth, guests who had been eyeing the exits returned to their seats when Haynes took the stage for what the Guardian described as a mix of fiery sermon and performance poetry, weaving in the boxer Muhammad Ali and the rapper Tupac Shakur. He branded Donald Trump “President Pickpocket” and cast Republicans as the authors of racist gerrymandering and voter suppression. “It’s not enough for us Democrats to diagnose the demolition,” he said. “We have to have the vision for a new reconstruction.” It was one thing, he told the crowd, to recite how “sorry, trifling, cheating and tacky” the Republicans are, and another to have a vision of “reconstructing what this nation should look like.”
Haynes won a decisive primary. The Guardian reported Sunday that, with Crockett having carried the district with 85% of the vote in 2024, he appears poised to defeat the Republican Everett Jackson, a small-business owner and community organiser, in next month’s midterm elections.
Haynes, who is African American, is running on a platform of equitable urban planning, a living wage, universal healthcare, laws to dismantle environmental racism and the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He called it absurd that 140 million Americans are economically insecure, and he demands true cost-of-living wages. On environmental justice, he points to Dallas neighbourhoods where, he says, life expectancy varies by 15 to 20 years between areas just 15 minutes apart because of pollution and asthma, and he pledges to fight corporate encroachment and data centers in vulnerable areas. His third domestic pillar is ending what he calls the country’s “cold civil war,” driven by Confederate-era policies and corporate greed, by building unity around common solutions.
Haynes pairs his domestic vision with an uncompromising critique of US foreign policy. He called the Trump administration’s global actions “a disaster for humanity,” pointing to the hypocrisy of the US targeting Venezuela and Iran out of an agenda driven by greed and a thirst for oil. In a departure from the Democratic establishment, he has been unbending on Israel and Gaza. “This country has sided with Israel in a full-on genocide,” he said. “I want to clearly state that hatred in any form is dead wrong, and so antisemitism is dead wrong, but so is Islamophobia, so is the extermination, the genocide of people in Gaza.” Echoing King’s warnings about Vietnam, he argued that bombs dropped abroad explode the country’s moral authority at home. “America’s hands are bloody when it comes to what has taken place with the Palestinians, what is going on in Iran,” he said. “America’s hands are bloody and dirty and it’s something that people of good conscience and goodwill believe is wrong.”
Haynes’s candidacy is part of a broader movement of progressive clergy seeking to reclaim faith-based politics from white evangelicals allied with Trump. The Guardian reported that at least 14 Democratic clergy members are running in the midterms across a dozen states, including fellow Texan James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian running for the US Senate against the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton. Haynes, who briefly succeeded the Rev Jesse Jackson as president of the Rainbow Push Coalition, credits Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns with carrying progressive policies into the Democratic mainstream from a “faith-based prophetic perspective.” Asked whether the approach risks alienating secular or non-Christian voters, he said: “The common denominator for all of us is humanity. If you care about human beings, we can work together. I’m not trying to proselytise. I believe every American should have access to opportunities from a justly wired society.”
Haynes draws a sharp distinction between progressive liberation theology and white Christian nationalism. Quoting King, he lamented that “white evangelicals are so busy being white, they don’t get around to being evangelical.” He traces Christian nationalism from slave traders and Bull Connor — the Alabama politician who unleashed dogs and fire hoses on peaceful protesters in the 1960s — to the present. “Unfortunately, it’s the same DNA that can support a Donald Trump, who has no Christian tendencies whatsoever,” Haynes argued. “As a matter of fact he’s closer to the antichrist than anybody I’ve ever witnessed. Yet they support him because he appeals to their whiteness and so, even if they marry wickedness to it, as long as their whiteness is taken care of, they’re fine with it.”
“That’s dangerous. It’s anti-Christian, it’s anti-Christ, but unfortunately in this country they are the heirs to a legacy of misusing faith in order to further an agenda of greed and power.”
Haynes does not spare his own party. He believes Democrats made a strategic and moral error by retreating from faith-based rhetoric. He also called Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas a “hot mess” and a burden on taxpayers. “We cannot afford Trump — he’s the face of the affordability crisis. We cannot afford Republican policies that cater to the Epstein billionaire class while crushing those who are poor and left behind,” he said. Campaign listening sessions, Haynes said, strengthened his resolve to get big money out of politics. “Right now we are calling ourselves a democracy but we are tilting toward fascism fueled with oligarchic tendencies.”
Social justice runs through Haynes’s family. Born in Dallas and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, he is named for his grandfather, the Rev Frederick Douglass Haynes Sr, who had named himself after the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The elder Haynes pastored Third Baptist Church of San Francisco and, in 1945, was the first African American to run for the city’s board of supervisors. His grandfather’s church hosted W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker and Martin Luther King Jr. His father, Frederick Douglass Haynes Jr, also pastored the church and died at 46 on the day the 14-year-old Haynes began high school. “Understanding that personal piety and social responsibility go together is part of my DNA and my understanding of the Black prophetic church tradition,” Haynes said.
After college and a brief stint at a San Francisco bank, Haynes returned to Dallas in 1982 to pastor Friendship-West, and over four decades he grew the congregation from 83 members to more than 13,000. A church benevolence fund expanded into a wider critique of poverty. “We should not just be concerned about doing ministry to those who’ve been made poor but we’ve got to question the systems in the richest country on the planet that create poverty,” he said. That work led him to team up with the California congresswoman Maxine Waters to fight predatory payday lending in Texas.
Members of the church and local Democrats view the candidacy with enthusiasm. Alan Bean, founder of Friends of Justice, a grassroots alliance that advocates for criminal justice reform, has known Haynes since 2006 and the Jena Six case in Louisiana, when six Black teenagers faced severe charges meant for adults. “Freddy Haynes and his church sent six buses of people to Jena,” Bean said. “Long before running for Congress, Dr Haynes has been a real presence across Texas and the country as a leader for justice.” Bean, a retired Baptist minister, praised Haynes as “a man of action, conviction and deep integrity,” and said his preaching “blends old-style Black preaching with hip-hop rhythms and language.” He predicted the media “will eat him up because he’s great for a soundbite.”
Bean’s daughter, Lydia Bean, 45, who is running for the Tarrant County clerkship, said: “For all these years we’ve been working together to hold elected officials accountable to better values, so it’s exciting to see him becoming an elected official. Now we’re going to have to hold him accountable as well!” Pastor Dwayne Hysmith, 59, who oversees 23 Fort Worth churches, said: “He’s very charismatic. He connects with the audience. He can speak from poetry to R&B to spiritually connected all in one, so a person that’s 16 years old to a person that’s 95 can understand the message.” Hysmith said the candidacy did not surprise him. “The Bible is a political and a social justice realm, so from Exodus all the way to Revelation, you’ll see politics and social justice in it,” he said. EJ Carrion, 37, a business owner, said: “I’m excited about the progressive values – fighting for equity and against racism and standing up for DEI. His authenticity and passion are so present. He tackles social justice without creating an us-against-them friction; he does it in a way that’s nuanced and clear.”
Haynes is a longtime friend of Crockett and has taken her advice during the campaign, describing her as “a unique superstar” and “the most popular Democrat in the country right now.” Crockett carried the 30th district with 85% of the vote in 2024 before Talarico defeated her in the Democratic Senate primary in March. The Guardian reported that polls show Talarico in an excruciatingly tight race with Paxton.
Haynes argues the numbers point to a Democratic breakthrough in Texas. “When you look at the numbers of people who voted in the primary, we win,” he said. “That’s the big fear that Republicans have because unfortunately they don’t have vision except to suppress and to hold people down and make sure the billionaire Epstein class is taken care of.” “Democrats have a vision,” he added, “and all we have to do is continue to organise and give voice to those who feel they have no voice and lift up a vision of liberty and justice and affordability. If we do that, there’s no way we cannot win. If we take advantage of that fighting spirit of Jasmine Crockett, we can turn this state blue.”