type: timeline_event In May 1981, during the Reagan administration, Tim LaHaye (then head of the Moral Majority), Paul Weyrich, Nelson Bunker Hunt, T. Cullen Davis, Howard Phillips, and William Cies founded the Council for National Policy (CNP) as an umbrella organization and networking group for conservative and Republican Party initiatives.
Critically, two of the three primary founders had direct ties to the John Birch Society: Tim LaHaye had "regularly lectured and ran training seminars for the John Birch Society in the 1960s and 70s" according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, while Nelson Bunker Hunt was "a one-time member of the John Birch Society's ruling council" who served on the JBS National Council from 1976-1985 and again from 2007 until his death in 2014. Hunt, along with his brother William Herbert, provided the CNP's start-up funding.
This JBS connection reveals the organizational continuity between mid-century anti-communist conspiracy networks and the modern conservative coordination infrastructure. The CNP represented an evolution of JBS methods - secretive coordination, elite networking, movement unification - applied to a new era of post-Reagan coalition building.
Paul Weyrich, who had co-founded Heritage Foundation and ALEC, took responsibility for bringing together what he called "the best minds of conservatism." His imprint on the group's mission was clear: it provided a secretive forum for religiously engaged conservative Christians to influence American political power while coordinating with corporate and wealthy donors.
The CNP was conceived to "bring more focus and force to conservative advocacy" by creating a closed-door coordination network where the most powerful conservatives could meet without public scrutiny. The organization was described by The New York Times as "a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country," who meet three times yearly behind closed doors at undisclosed locations for confidential conferences.
The secretive nature of CNP meetings allowed conservative religious leaders, corporate donors, think tank executives, political operatives, and elected officials to coordinate strategy, share resources, and plan campaigns without public accountability. Membership lists and meeting agendas were closely guarded, enabling frank discussions about political strategy and movement building away from media scrutiny.
The CNP represented the culmination of the Powell Memo's vision of coordinated conservative infrastructure - a secretive network where corporate money, religious conservative activism, think tank policy development, and political power could be integrated and directed toward systematic capture of governing institutions.
The organization's founding in 1981, the same year Heritage Foundation's "Mandate for Leadership" was implemented by Reagan, demonstrated how quickly conservative infrastructure had matured from the scattered elements of the early 1970s into a sophisticated, coordinated network capable of exercising significant political power while maintaining operational secrecy.