On February 9, 1950, Joseph McCarthy, the junior senator from Wisconsin, gave a speech to a Republican women's club in Wheeling, West Virginia. McCarthy used the speech to unveil a list of 205 individuals he alleged were communists working in the U.S. government. The major theme of the speech, though, was that the United States, a Christian nation, was under attack from godless communists:

The battle was a moral one between good Christian Americans and godless communist traitors who had been “born with silver spoons in their mouths” right in America. It was McCarthy's moral duty to cleanse the United States of these atheistic traitors.

McCarthy's short but potent career hunting down supposed communists in the United States government is revealing. He was a highly controversial figure during his time largely because his lists of supposed communist sympathizers were rarely backed up with any evidence, but most people agreed with his basic message if not his tactics: Communists were bad and, more important for the purposes of this research, America was a Christian nation.