James Pike


James Albert Pike was an American Episcopal bishop, prolific writer, and one of the first mainline religious figures to appear regularly on television.
His outspoken, and to some heretical, views on many theological and social issues made him one of the most controversial public figures of his time. He was an early proponent of ordination of women and racial desegregation within mainline churches. Pike was the fifth Bishop of California. Late in his life he explored psychic experimentation in an effort to contact his recently deceased son.

Early life

Pike was born in Oklahoma City on February 14, 1913. His father died when he was two, and his mother married California attorney Claude McFadden. The young Pike was a Roman Catholic and considered the priesthood; however, while attending the University of Santa Clara, he came to consider himself an agnostic. Thereafter, Pike transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles, for a year before transferring again to the University of Southern California, where he received his undergraduate degree in 1934 and LL.B. in 1936. Subsequently, he earned his J.S.D. degree from Yale Law School as a Sterling Fellow. He was admitted to the California bar in 1936. After leaving Yale, he served as a staff attorney for the New Deal-era Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C. from 1938 to 1942. He also served as a lecturer in law at the Catholic University of America and George Washington University. In the Second World War, he served with Naval Intelligence.

Conversion and early church life

After the war, Pike and his second wife joined the Episcopal Church. He first entered Virginia Theological Seminary and then Union Theological Seminary to prepare for the priesthood. Pike was ordained as a deacon by the Bishop of Washington D.C., Angus Dun, on December 21, 1944. He was ordained as a priest on November 1, 1946.
Pike first served as a curate at St. John's Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. from 1944 to 1946. He then accepted an appointment as Rector of Christ Church, Poughkeepsie where he served Episcopalian students at Vassar College. In 1949, he became chaplain at Columbia University.
Pike graduated from Union Theological Seminary in 1951. Remaining on the adjunct faculty of Columbia, Pike became the Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1952. Using his new position and media savvy, he vociferously opposed the local Catholic bishops over their attacks on Planned Parenthood and their opposition to birth control. He accepted an invitation to receive an honorary doctorate from the in Tennessee, but then publicly declined after finding that the university did not admit African Americans. An example of Pike's use of the media is how he released his letter to The New York Times before it was delivered to Sewanee's trustees: they heard the news when reporters called for reactions. It was also at this time that he publicly challenged Senator Joseph McCarthy's allegation that 7,000 American pastors were part of a Kremlin conspiracy; when the newly elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower backed up Pike, McCarthy and his movement began to lose their influence.
In New York, Pike reached a large audience with liberal sermons and weekly television programs. Common topics included birth control, abortion laws, racism, capital punishment, apartheid, antisemitism, and farm worker exploitation.

Election as bishop

Pike was elected as bishop coadjutor of California in 1958 and succeeded to the see a few months later, following the death of his predecessor, Karl Morgan Block. He served in this position until 1966, when he resigned to become a senior fellow for the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California, a liberal think tank founded by Robert Maynard Hutchins. During this period, he was an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and the Graduate Theological Union.
at a press conference after the march to Selma, Alabama
His episcopate was marked by both professional and personal controversy. He was one of the leaders of the Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State movement, which advocated against John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign because of Catholic teachings. While at Grace Cathedral, he was involved with promoting a living wage for workers in San Francisco, the acceptance of LGBT people in the church, and civil rights. He also recognized a Methodist minister as having dual ordination and freedom to serve in the diocese. Later, he ordained a woman as a first-order deacon, now known as a "transitional deacon", usually the first step in the process towards ordination in the priesthood in the Episcopal church. The ordination was not approved until after Pike's death.
Among his notable accomplishments, Pike invited Martin Luther King Jr. to speak at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco in 1965 following his march to Selma, Alabama.
Pike's theology involved the rejection of central Christian beliefs. His writings questioned a number of widely accepted beliefs, including the virginity of Mary, the Mother of Jesus; the doctrine of Hell, and the Trinity. He famously called for "fewer beliefs, more belief." Heresy procedures were begun in 1962, 1964, 1965, and 1966, each growing in intensity, but in the end the Church decided it was not in the denomination's best interest to pursue an actual heresy trial. He was censured in 1966 by the House of Bishops, which said "His writing and speaking on profound realities with which Christian faith and worship are concerned are too often marred by caricatures of treasured symbols and at the worst, by cheap vulgarizations of great expressions of the faith."
In his personal life, Pike had been a chain-smoker and an alcoholic. His charismatic personality drew many people to him, including Maren Hackett Bergrud, with whom he developed a romantic relationship after the failure of his second marriage in 1965.

''The Other Side''

In 1966, Pike's son Jim took his own life in a New York City hotel room. Shortly after his son's death, Pike reported experiencing poltergeist phenomena—books vanishing and reappearing, safety pins open and indicating the approximate hour of his son's death, half the clothes in a closet disarranged and heaped up. Pike led a public pursuit of various spiritualist and clairvoyant methods of contacting his deceased son to reconcile. In September 1967, Pike participated in a televised séance with his dead son through the medium Arthur Ford, an ordained minister in the Disciples of Christ church. Pike detailed these experiences in his book The Other Side.

Personal life and death

Pike's first marriage to Jane Alvies ended in divorce in 1941. He married Esther Yanovsky in 1942. She filed for divorce from Pike in 1966. They had four children, two boys and two girls. He lived with, but did not marry, his secretary Maren Bergrud, until 1967, when she committed suicide after they had an argument. In 1968 he married Diane Kennedy, with whom he had collaborated on a book detailing his experience with spiritualism.
In August 1969, Pike and Diane traveled to Israel, to perform research for a proposed book. On September 2 they drove into the Judean Desert. In preparation for a book on the historical Jesus, they wanted to have a feeling for the landscape where Jesus went into the wilderness to fast and meditate for 40 days. They were unprepared for the journey, having taken along only two Cokes and no water. When their rented car became stuck in a deep rut, the two were not able to extract it. After an hour of stressful efforts to get the car to move, they decided to walk toward Qumran, where they knew there would be water. What they did not know was that they were far south of Qumran in Wadi Mashash. After two hours of walking in the very hot sun, Pike felt he had to rest. Diane was concerned that, without water, they would both die there. She determined to walk on to find help. After ten long hours of climbing on the walls of the canyon and stumbling along a road under construction, she came upon a camp of Arab laborers. They gave her tea to drink until the foreman came and took her to the nearest army camp. It took four days to find Pike's body. He had tried to follow his wife and had fallen more than 60 feet down a steep canyon wall where he died. The probable date of his death is September 2; some sources cite it as between September 3 and 7. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Jaffa, Israel, on September 8, 1969.

In literature

Works cited