The Conservative Christian Group You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

Operating in the shadows for the last forty years, the Council for National Policy could be the most secretive organization in Washington

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A while back, I wrote about how in the late 1970s, I spent a summer working for my cousin’s auto dealership in Fayetteville, Tennessee. Aside from spending a summer an hour’s drive from the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, there was something else about that summer that stuck with me.

One night as my cousin sat in his Lazy Boy chair flipping through channels, he stopped to watch a show headlined by a television pastor. The program was a television version of the tent meetings that spring up every summer across the South. But the television presentation was so over the top that we couldn’t help but laugh.

The star of the show was a Baptist pastor who held himself out as a faith healer. Spitting out Bible verses as he placed his hands on the foreheads of the allegedly afflicted, he claimed to cure ailments ranging from paralysis to speech impediments.

My cousin and I laughed at what we believed was an orchestrated performance. I never forgot about that pastor. A few years later, I saw him on television again. He’d gotten involved in politics.

A signature aspect of the Reagan era was the blurring of the separation between religion and politics. The preacher I’d scoffed at that night at my cousin’s house, Jerry Falwell, was now the head of the Moral Majority, a Christian political organization associated with the Republican Party. Far from his days as a faith healer on late-night television, Falwell now had direct access to the President of the United States.

Although the Moral Majority came into existence ostensibly as a response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion, according to a 2014 Politico article by Randall Balmer, the Mandel family professor in the arts and sciences at Dartmouth College, the organization’s true origin story is quite different:

[T]he abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979— a full six years after Roe — that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools…

Although abortion had emerged as a rallying cry by 1980, the real roots of the religious right lie not the defense of a fetus but in the defense of racial segregation.

Around the same time, a more secretive, more extreme group emerged behind the scenes, laying the foundation for Donald Trump’s ascension to the U.S. presidency. That organization was the Council for National Policy.

Founded in 1981 by right-wing Christian activists, the Council for National Policy (CNP) counts among its founders Paul Weyrich, a founder and leader of the Moral Majority (Weyrich also founded the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank). In 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an organization that monitors right-wing hate groups, obtained a copy of the CNP’s 2014 Membership Directory.

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The SPLC describes the CNP membership list, which includes familiar names such as Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Kellyanne Conway, who served as Senior Counselor to the President in the Trump administration:

The list is surprising, not so much for the conservatives who dominate it — activists of the religious right and the so-called “culture wars,” along with a smattering of wealthy financiers, Congressional operatives, right-wing consultants and Tea Party enthusiasts — but for the many real extremists who are included…

The 2014 CNP members are paragons of the conservative establishment. There are business titans, Christian college presidents, owners and editors of right-wing media outlets, GOP mega-donors, government staffers and leading members of conservative think tanks. There are officials of organizations like the National Rifle Association and the Federalist Society. There are politicians and political appointees, anti-abortion activists and also some who are less known publicly as conservatives, like Linda L. Bean, who owns L.L. Bean Inc., an outdoorsy clothing company.

According to a September 2021 article in The Guardian, the CNP’s current membership is an amalgamation of conservative politicians, religious leaders, and members of corporate America; there is Marc Johansen, vice-president for the satellites and intelligence program for Boeing; Jeffrey Coors, of the Coors brewing family; Lee Roy Mitchell, the founder, and chairman of the board for Cinemark Holdings, the movie chain owner; Steve Forbes, of the Forbes business media empire.

Fast forward to the 2020 election. By this point, the CNP—and the various conservative causes under its vast umbrella—was all in for Donald Trump. Even after the failure of Trump’s legal efforts, CNP members doubled down, helping to spread the election fraud lie.

Leading up to the January 6th “Stop the Steal” rally, Turning Point USA, led by CNP member Charlie Kirk, funded busloads of students to the event; Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, promoted the event on her social media.

It could be months before we know the full extent of the CNP’s participation in the events of January 6th, if ever. But one thing is clear, their movement has come a long way from tent meeting-style televangelism.