Pike was now known as a spokesman for liberal Protestantism, and in 1955 was invited by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) to host his own weekly television program, "The Dean Pike Show," (later renamed "The Bishop Pike Show") which made celebrities of Pike and his wife, and soon eclipsed Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s long-running "Life Is Worth Living" in popularity. Common topics included birth control, abortion laws, racism, capital punishment, apartheid, antisemitism, and farm worker exploitation, with Pike weighing in at the end to give what he called “a five-minute commercial for God.” In 1956 he participated in a trip to Israel to study and report on Arab refugee problems, and in 1957 he was appointed to the seven-person Zellerbach Commission, created by the International Rescue Committee, to study the European Iron Curtain refugee issue.