The Jesuits frequently attract public attention, and one such occasion for notoriety occurred in the days of the Communist hunt commonly associated with the name of the junior Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph Raymond McCarthy (1908–1957). During the years from 1950 to 1957 there were repeated attempts to link McCarthy with the Jesuits, (or, paradoxically, to link him with the Senator's opponents). The national Jesuit weekly America became embroiled in one of the most bitter arguments which broke out in the controversy. The events illustrate not only the intensely divisive nature of the dispute over McCarthy, but the peculiar position of the order both in the Church and in the intellectual life of the nation as well.

While American Society was coming apart in the 1960s, an impressive array of historians rallied to condemn what Rayford Logan called “the astigmatism of the social gospel” in race relations. Preoccupied by the ills of urban-industrial disorder, they suggested, the prophets of post-Reconstruction social Christianity either ignored or betrayed the Negro and left his fortunes in the hands of a hostile white South. The indictment of the social gospel on this count hinged upon the racism of Josiah Strong, the faithlessness of Lyman Abbott, and the complicity in silence of Washington Gladden, Walter Rauschenbusch, and the others.