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For those who measure significance by media attention and celebrity status, the story of Bishop James Pike is a cautionary one. During his peak in the Fifties and Sixties, Pike was one of the most recognized Christians of his time, on par with Bishop Fulton Sheen and Billy Graham. From 1955 to 1961, ABC ran a successful Sunday–afternoon talk show hosted by the bishop, whereas both Sheen and Graham failed at weekly shows. Gracing the cover of Time, holding press conferences with Martin Luther King, Jr., giving provocative quotes to reporters, and enjoying a long run as a bestselling author, Bishop Pike was the public face of Christianity for many in America.
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Which is all the more sobering considering how thoroughly he has disappeared from our cultural radar. David Robertson's biography, A Passionate Pilgrim, sets out to bring Pike back into the conversation. The subject must have sounded ideal for a biography—the story of an outspoken, thrice–married celebrity Episcopal bishop who prophetically voiced support for progressive causes, questioned the church's doctrines, experimented with drugs, dallied with sé;ances, and died in the Israeli wilderness—but one gets the impression that Robertson found filling in the details less than inspiring. Pike's inconsistencies, his alcoholism, his womanizing, his sophistry in getting out of jams, his overspending (both institutional and personal), his narcissism, and the damage to those around him—especially the suicides of his eldest son, one live–in lover, and the attempted suicide of one daughter: all this makes for a punishing chronicle that gets darker as it goes.
Those who remember Pike as a liberal leader may be surprised to hear that he began his career as an agitator on the right. From his first pulpit in Poughkeepsie, New York, down the street from Vassar, he railed against a liberal chaplain next–door and criticized the university's faculty for being "Unitarian, humanist, materialist, and Marxist." He even organized talks on campus for browbeating evangelists. Not always playing fair, Pike eventually got the chaplain fired and raised his visibility enough to get offered a more prestigious job: chaplain at Columbia University and chairman of the religion department.
In 1952, Pike moved next door, becoming dean of the cathedral at St. John the Divine. To be dean at the world's largest cathedral in the heart of Manhattan is a plum position, and Pike made the most of it, with superb instincts for working the media. He picked a fight with the Catholic bishops over their attacks on Planned Parenthood and their opposition to birth control. When asked to receive an honorary doctorate from Sewanee in Tennessee, he first accepted and then publicly turned it down after finding that the university did not admit African Americans into their seminary. Characteristically, Pike 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.
He also publicly challenged Senator Joseph McCarthy's claim that 7,000 U.S. pastors were part of the Kremlin's conspiracy. When newly elected President Eisenhower backed up Pike, the scales began to tip the other way for McCarthy and his movement.
It was at St. John's that ABC's "The Dean Pike Show" was launched (later changed to "The Bishop Pike Show") and he became a national figure. Every Sunday, three to four thousand filled the sanctuary to hear him preach. Here Pike discovered his vocation as an author, usually popularizing other's thoughts but having the knack for catching people's attention. In his new role as spokesman for the faith, Pike strove to make the church "relevant" to the culture. He became an advocate for civil rights, the poor, women's ordination, abortion, and homosexual rights, and explained new ideas in theology to the masses. While many saw him as an enemy of orthodox Christianity, Pike saw himself as a passionate defender of the church. There is a reason he was asked to offer a prayer at a Billy Graham crusade. Throughout his career, he wanted people to encounter God by stripping away unnecessary barriers to the faith. Of course, how one defines "unnecessary" makes all the difference.
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