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Pike had been dean barely a year when he declined an honorary degree and withdrew as baccalaureate speaker at the Episcopal Church's University of the South at Sewanee, Tenn. because Sewanee refused to admit Negroes. "I could not in conscience," he said, "accept a doctorate in white divinity." Said Pike of the late Senator McCarthy's methods: "Communism is an evil, and evil cannot be defeated by evil—we cannot drive out demons by Beelzebub." When New York's Cardinal Spellman mounted the pulpit of St. Patrick's Cathedral to warn Catholics not to see the movie Baby Doll, Dean Pike defended the film as not pornographic ("How the viewer receives the experience depends upon his intent"). The dean has conquered television as well as the headlines; some 60 stations show his program, Dean Pike.
San Francisco seemed delighted last week at getting one of the country's top clergymen. Said one Episcopalian: "First the Giants and now Pike—what more can we ask?" And Columnist Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle noted: "Yes, yes, all you phoner-inners, we agree that Nob Hill should be called Pike's Peak, now that the Very Rev. James Pike will preside in Grace Cathedral."