Mediating Race, Class, and Culture: An American Pastor in the 20th Century

At the joint between religion and society, pastors must function in both domains and reconcile the two when necessary. As an example, this article follows the life of Howard Haines, an American Protestant pastor trained in the New York ecumenical/evangelical tradition of the early 1900s, whose sixty years of pastoring threaded through war and peace, the North and the South, the United States and abroad. The discussion highlights the formation of his key commitments to social action, particularly in bridging racial, class, and cultural divides. More broadly, the article attends to the nature of durability in pastoral values and commitments, durability that may seem at times to fade, yet later reappear. The article also underlines the methodological importance of having full biographical details of a pastor’s life, including materials that reflect both a pastor’s formal public statements (such as sermons and newspaper articles) and a pastor’s more private reckonings of personal and pastoral life (such as journals and correspondence).