Tim LaHaye — Baptist pastor, co-author of the future "Left Behind" series, husband of Concerned Women for America founder Beverly LaHaye — founds the Council for National Policy (CNP) in 1981 with seed money from Texas oil billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt and T. Cullen Davis. Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, and Howard Phillips serve as co-founders. The CNP's founding purpose is explicit: create a coordination mechanism for the three legs of the conservative movement — religious right, corporate libertarians, and national security hawks — to align strategy outside public view.
The CNP operates through strict secrecy: membership lists are confidential, meetings are off-the-record, media are excluded, and members are instructed not to acknowledge the organization's existence. Meetings occur three times yearly at undisclosed locations. The membership deliberately bridges the religious right (LaHaye, Falwell, Dobson, Robertson), corporate interests (Koch representatives, DeVos family, Mercer family), political operatives (Weyrich, Viguerie, Karl Rove, Kellyanne Conway), and media figures (Oliver North, Wayne LaPierre).
The CNP is the answer to a structural problem: how do you coordinate a political movement that spans religious institutions, corporate donors, think tanks, media outlets, and elected officials without creating a visible command structure that can be attacked? The CNP's solution is the same one Philip Agre's capture model describes: restructure the information flows between institutions so that coordination happens through shared orientation rather than direct command. CNP meetings don't issue orders — they align priorities, introduce donors to operatives, connect media figures to policy shops, and ensure that the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, ALEC, the NRA, Focus on the Family, and dozens of other organizations are working toward compatible goals.
Anne Nelson's 2019 book Shadow Network documents the CNP's role as the coordination hub for the American right from Reagan through Trump. The CNP's membership overlaps with the boards of virtually every major conservative organization. Its leaked membership directories (2014, 2020) reveal the network's scope: more than 400 members including cabinet officials, Supreme Court justices' spouses, media executives, and billionaire donors. The CNP doesn't direct the conservative movement — it synchronizes it.