The committee professed to serve both a "watchdog" function in relation to church-state and educational issues, and the academic community through generating original research and promoting religious literacy.
Past fellows included Van Harvey, Joseph L. Blau, Carol Meyers, Morton Smith, Karen Armstrong, Vern Bullough, Joseph Fletcher, Lewis Feuer, Theodor Gaster, Gerd Lüdemann, Antony Flew, John Hick, David Noel Freedman, John Dominic Crossan, Alan Ryan, Don Cupitt, Margaret Chatterjee, Richard Taylor, Susan Blackmore, Robert Carroll, Arthur Peacocke, Clinton Bennett and Peter Atkins.
The two men primarily responsible for organizing this group were the philosopher Paul Kurtz and the professor of archaeology and Biblical history at the University of Southern California Gerald A. Larue.
The conference, sponsored by the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism (CODESH), was in response to President Ronald Reagan’s signing of the Congressional Resolution J-5018, which declared 1983 the "Year of the Bible."
The participants included Senators Sam Ervin (D-North Carolina), Lowell Weicker (R-Connecticut), Professor James Robinson, Henry Steele Commager, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Michael Novak, Paul Kurtz, and Gerald A. Larue.