James Albert Pike was an American Episcopal bishop, accused heretic, iconoclast, prolific writer, and one of the first mainline, charismatic religious figures to appear regularly on television.
Pike's outspoken, and to some of his fellow bishops, 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. The chain smoking Pike was the fifth Bishop of California, and a few years before he began to explore spiritualism and psychic phenomena in an effort to contact his deceased son, became a recovering alcoholic.