Since the World War I years, the FBI had explicated its attention to communism as a particular threat to national security. With the onset of the Cold War, the variety of US intelligence institutions – the FBI, the CIA, the Division of Army Intelligence, etc. – promoted the specter of communism as the supreme enemy of the American people. These federal agencies drew on Woodrow Wilson's forceful argument that America had to take leadership in keeping the world safe for democracy to formulate an analysis of freedom and economic power that rendered “godless communism” the primal form of evil that threatened the American way of life. In this context, American Christians began to vie for a foothold in a rapidly shifting terrain as previous claims about power, values, religion, and American identity were forced into new postures of meaning.

It is especially relevant to note the tension between two genealogies of American Christianity: the social gospel and evangelical fundamentalism. The social gospel movement was characterized by its emphasis on worldly activism to address economic suffering, particularly in the form of urban poverty, homelessness, hunger, and unemployment. Its roots of social gospel Christianity lay with the liberal tradition of Christian theology in the late nineteenth century. Theologians such as Adolf von Harnack, whose popular What Is Christianity appeared in English in 1901, sifted through what he called the husks of fantastic miracle stories, unscientific claims such as riding on clouds, and other aspects of ancient worldviews in the Bible to grasp the essential “kernel” of Christianity. That essence, said Harnack, was love. To accept the Christian gospel was to embrace the universal “fatherhood” of God and the universal “brotherhood” of humanity. Salvation lay in creating the kingdom of God on earth, which meant making the world conform to the will of God – peace, justice, and equality on earth right now, for the living, not the dead. Living the Christian gospel, in other words, meant perfecting the present world by ameliorating social suffering. As global financiers such as John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937), Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), and J. P. Morgan (1867–1943) accumulated unprecedented levels of individual wealth, the rise of urbanization simultaneously witnessed the conspicuous display of brazen squalor.