James Pike

The Right Reverend James Pike
Bishop of California
Pike in 1966
Church	Episcopal Church in the United States of America
See	California
In office	1958–1966
Predecessor	Karl M. Block
Successor	C. Kilmer Myers
Orders
Ordination	1946
Consecration	1958
Personal details
Born	(1913-02-14)February 14, 1913 Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Died	c. September 3–7, 1969 (aged 56) Wadi Mashash, Israel
Denomination	Episcopal
Spouse	Jane Alvies (m. 1938; civilly div. 1941)[1] Esther Yanovsky (m. 1942;[2] div. 1966) Diane Kennedy (m. 1968) [3]
Alma mater	University of Southern California Yale University Union Theological Seminary

James Albert Pike (February 14, 1913 – c. September 3–7, 1969)^[4] 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, racial desegregation, and the acceptance of LGBT people within mainline churches.^[5] 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 (1930–1932), he came to consider himself an agnostic. Thereafter, Pike transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles, for a year (1932–1933) before transferring again to the University of Southern California, where he received his undergraduate degree in 1934. Subsequently, he earned his Bachelor of Laws (1936) and Doctor of Juridical Science (1938) degrees from Yale Law School. He was admitted to the California bar in 1936. After leaving Yale, he served as a staff attorney for the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, DC, during Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal era from 1938 to 1942. He also taught law as a lecturer at the Catholic University of America (1938–1939) and George Washington University (1938–1942). In the Second World War, he served with Naval Intelligence.

Conversion and early church life

After the Second World War, Pike and his second wife joined the Episcopal Church. He first entered Virginia Theological Seminary (1945–1946) and then Union Theological Seminary (Bachelor of Divinity, 1951) to prepare for the priesthood. He was ordained in 1946, first serving as an assistant at St. John's Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square in Washington, DC, before accepting a joint appointment as Rector of Christ Church and Episcopalian chaplain at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. In 1949, he became head of the department of religion and chaplain at Columbia University.

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 University of the South 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.^[5] 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.^[6]

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.^[7]

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 (1966–1967) and the Graduate Theological Union (1966).

Pike with Martin Luther King Jr. 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.^[8] 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.^[9] 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.^[10]

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 virginityof Mary, the Mother of Jesus,^[11] the doctrine of Hell, and the Trinity.^[11] He famously called for "fewer beliefs, more belief."^[10] 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.^[5]

In his personal life, Pike had been a chain-smoker and an alcoholic.^[12] 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.^[13] 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

Pike's first marriage to Jane Alvies was annulled in 1941. He married Esther Yanovsky in 1942; she filed for divorce from Pike in 1965 (finalized 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 (he performed the funeral for her in his church). In 1968 he married Diane Kennedy (born 1938), with whom he had collaborated on a book detailing his experience with spiritualism.^[5]

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 why Jesus would have gone out into that 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 (neither knew how to use the car's jack). 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 so 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 ceemetery in Jaffa, Israel, on September 8, 1969.

In literature

• James Pike was an inspiration for the character of Timothy Archer in Philip K. Dick's book, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. They were friends, and Pike officiated at Dick's wedding to Nancy Hackett, stepdaughter of Maren Hackett (1966).^[14]
• Joan Didion wrote about Pike and the building of the Grace Cathedral in her collection of essays, The White Album (1979).^[15]
• E. L. Doctorow includes Pike as a fictionalized character in his novel, City of God (2000).

Major works

Notes

References

Further reading

External links

• James A. Pike Papers, Syracuse University
• Nimoy, Leonard, "Bishop Pike", In Search of...
• Bibliographic directory from Project Canterbury