Considered the flagship magazine of US mainline Protestantism,[1] the monthly reports on religious news; comments on theological, moral, and cultural issues; and reviews books, movies, and music.

During the Second World War, the magazine helped provide a venue for promotion of ideas by Christian activists who opposed the internment of Japanese Americans.

In 1956 the magazine was challenged by the establishment of Christianity Today by Carl F. H. Henry, which sought to present a theologically conservative evangelical viewpoint, while restoring many social concerns abandoned by fundamentalists.

It sent editors to a march in Selma, Alabama in 1965 and was one of the first national magazines to publish Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" along with six of his other essays.

Other writers published by the Century over its long history include Jane Addams, Albert Schweitzer, W. E. B. DuBois, Reuben Markham, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Reinhold Niebuhr, Richard John Neuhaus, Paul Tillich, John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Thomas Merton, James Cone, Rosemary Rutherford, Mary Daly, Billy Graham, Wendell Berry, Henri Nouwen, N. T. Wright, Delores S. Williams, Sarah Coakley, Rowan Williams, and Marilynne Robinson.

[8] As late as 1944 the magazine published articles such as "A Reply to Screamers" by Fred Eastman[9] which admonished the suggestion that there was a moral obligation for the United States to aid in the plight of European Jews being murdered during the Holocaust.