Among its founding members were: Tim LaHaye, then the head of the Moral Majority, Nelson Bunker Hunt, T. Cullen Davis, William Cies, Howard Phillips,[7] and Paul Weyrich.

Senator Trent Lott, Southern Baptist Convention activists and retired Texas Court of Appeals Judge Paul Pressler, lawyer and paleoconservative activist Michael Peroutka,[9] Reverend Paige Patterson,[10] Senator Don Nickles, former United States Attorneys General Edwin Meese and John Ashcroft, gun-rights activist Larry Pratt, Colonel Oliver North, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, philanthropist Elsa Prince (mother of Blackwater founder and former CEO Erik Prince and Trump Administration Secretary of Education Betsy Devos), Leonard Leo, Virginia Thomas (wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas).

[5] The New York Times political writer David D. Kirkpatrick suggested that the organization's secrecy since its founding was intended to insulate it "from what its members considered the liberal bias of the news media.

Members include corporate executives,[14] legislators,[14] former high ranking government officers,[14] leaders of 'think tanks'[14] dedicated to molding society and those whom many view as "Christian leadership".

[15][16] A membership list for September 2020, leaked a year later, included Jerome Corsi, Michael Farris, Brigitte Gabriel, Frank Gaffney, Charlie Kirk, Tony Perkins, and Mathew Staver.

[4][17] Leading members of the CNP voted in a meeting at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City, on September 29, 2007, to consider launching a third party candidate if the 2008 Republican nominee were pro-choice.

[21][22][23] Other members included Jeane Kirkpatrick, Leszek Kołakowski, Irving Kristol, Melvin J. Lasky, Seymour M. Lipset, Donald Rumsfeld, Tom Stoppard and George Will.

[24] CNP's membership also overlaps significantly with that of the Arlington Group, a coalition of conservative Christian organizations which spearheaded ballot initiatives banning gay marriage in thirty-two states in the 2000s;[25][26][27] and with the second, third and fourth iterations of the Committee on the Present Danger.

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney[30] and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney[31] spoke at a four-day conference that the council held in Salt Lake City, Utah, during the last week of September 2007.

[33] In an October 14, 2020, Washington Post article, which described the CNP as a "little-known group that has served for decades as a hub for a nationwide network of conservative activists and the donors who support them", one of the attendees of the August 2020 meeting in Arlington, warned of plans by Democrats to "steal this election".