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The Council on Foreign Relations is finally shedding its stodgy, establishment upbringing--and it took only the better part of a century.

Last month, 65 men and women gathered at the council's elegant, unmarked Park Avenue headquarters in Manhattan for not-for-attribution discussions of the type that have characterized the CFR's nearly 90-year existence. Their agenda included foreign-policy challenges facing the next administration, conflict in the Middle East, democracy, and the promotion of religious freedom.

Although the topics may sound familiar, the appearances of the discussants would likely have caused the council's founders to rub their eyes: The participation of Episcopalians was expected, even if some wore heels, and Catholic priests and Jewish rabbis were not unknown in 1921, but a black-turbaned Shiite imam? Sunnis wearing small caps? Evangelicals, some with Southern accents? Black Pentecostals and Baptists? The rabble, as some of the 20th-century gentlemen doubtlessly would have termed the 21st-century group, included some of America's top religious leaders, who attended the Religion and Foreign Policy workshop for the same reasons that people have always come to the council.

"I'm here to learn about American foreign policy, the effective factors influencing it, what people are thinking, and where they are going," said Mohammad Tariq Sherwani, director of the Muslim Center of New York.

"It was a great opportunity for networking among religious leaders and experts," said Mihir Meghani, the president of the Hindu American Foundation.

"My daughter has an apartment close to here," said a rabbi from Washington, who also noted that he was interested in exploring a convergence of religious and secular discussions on foreign affairs. "It's a good chance to see her."

A few years ago, the bastion of America's foreign-policy elite began a quiet revolution. Since the 1970s, the CFR's geographic and political scope had steadily broadened as the group welcomed national members and took incremental steps beyond European geopolitics to look at human rights, arms control, development, HIV/AIDS, humanitarian aid, and other ethical concerns. In the first few years of the new century, though, the council decided it could no longer just focus on furthering discussions among its nearly 5,000 selected members. After the terrorist attacks of 2001, the entire nation had plunged into a colloquium of foreign affairs, and the CFR no longer held a monopoly on the topic. "To the extent there was an establishment in this country that dominated American foreign policy, that's gone," says Richard Haass, the council's president since 2003.

To reach the newcomers, the organization stepped up its public meetings and task forces reports and created a foreign-policy portal on its website, which drew nearly 5 million unique visitors last year. In 2005, it began programming events for nonmembers by creating outreach initiatives for academics, state and local officials, and religious leaders. Each group has regular teleconferences with council experts, a monthly bulletin, and occasional conferences like the mid-July event.

"It's cheap guest speakers," says Robert Strong, associate provost at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, one of the 115 schools participating in the academic calls. Strong invites a dozen students to the teleconferences, handing out the council's reading materials in advance and listening while they ask questions of the featured expert. "We don't have to pay honorariums, we don't have to pick them up at the airport or take them out to dinner, and our students get to share a national audience with a guest speaker."

The gatherings "provide some great context and an analysis to midlevel state officials who are making big, tough decisions but don't have the benefit of being in D.C. and plugging into the think-tank community," says Chris Whatley, director of international affairs at the Council of State Governments. A China-focused teleconference last year helped states understand pressure from that country to curtail trade visits to Taiwan; a council fellow, Edward Alden, gave an economics presentation to Whatley's constituents at a conference last year and then, after listening to the attendees, asked Whatley to poll the states about the impact of visa restrictions (he plans to include the results in his forthcoming book, The Closing of the American Border). The outreach has been "very much a two-way street," Alden says.

A fair-minded account of the current Council on Foreign Relations should acknowledge that, as conspiracy theorists suspect, its founders did indeed intend to set the course of world events. To the extent that they failed--and judged by their initial goals, they failed quite spectacularly--it was the result of a world too large and chaotic for gentlemen to settle over tea; it was not a reflection of the pedigree and intentions of the gentlemen themselves.

The ambitious international interests of the council's creators did not stem from an affiliation with the Illuminati, Marxists, a shadow government, or, at least in the aggregate, the Freemasons. They were a group of 150 scholars tasked by President Wilson in 1917 with laying plans for a postwar Europe. The men, who called themselves the Inquiry, worked a frantic, secret 13 months at the headquarters of the American Geographical Society in New York City. Twenty-three scholars and three Army truckloads of materials then accompanied Wilson to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, where the academics, like their future counterparts, crashed into the cold calculus of strategic reality. Instead of a lasting peace, they got the Treaty of Versailles, which brought Germany to its knees and eventually helped the Great War become the first of two.

Undaunted, the scholars returned home and joined forces with New York's financial elite in 1921 to charter the Council on Foreign Relations to "afford a continuous conference on international questions affecting the United States." They created a public journal, Foreign Affairs, and members began tackling the grand questions of the day over private dinners and off-the-record discussions, with, at times, uneven results: Their first study of Russia, according to a somewhat official history of the council by Peter Grose, concluded that the Bolsheviks were heading toward "sanity and sound business practice."

In Washington, where the council will move to a new Foggy Bottom building early next year from an outpost it opened in 1972, the group has similarly increased its services to nonmembers. It hosts a Friday roundtable for Hill staffers; breakfasts for new members of Congress on the topic of their choice; near-monthly dinners for House and Senate chiefs of staff; and luncheons for the diplomatic community. For members, it has regular events, on and off the record: Last year the council held 58 such meetings, 24 of which were off-the-record for members alone, the remainder of which were open to the press and transcribed for the website.

Although Washington is chock-full of think tanks and networking events--compare the council's World War I study to the dozens of groups that have produced work on Iraq--the council's bipartisan, gold-standard reputation still offers a unique opportunity, according to its members.

Events are "of a high caliber, and the audience is very smart," said Ashley Deeks, a member of the council's term program for young professionals, who is on leave from State for a temporary CFR fellowship. "It's also a good opportunity to get to know other people around town who are around my age and working on foreign policy."

The council's efforts to reach nonmembers is partly a response to a broadening national interest in foreign affairs and partly, Haass admits, a response to increased competition from other organizations and media outlets. "We are in the business of producing and disseminating ideas," he said. "We are competing for time and money."

Some of the council's new audiences are as interested in teaching the establishment as they are in learning from it. As the "symbolic home of the center of American foreign policy," in the words of the Rev. J. Bryan Hehir, a Harvard professor and the president of Catholic Charities for the Boston Archdiocese, the council has long been the standard-bearer for the politics of hard power; soft power concerns, like those raised by religious groups, have been late additions to the table. "I think they have been pretty slow to acknowledge the role of religion," said Richard Cizik, the vice president of governmental affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals.

"The council is catching up with some good work out there and putting it into its professional worldview the way that only the council can," said Chris Seiple, president of the Institute for Global Engagement and an adviser to the council's religious outreach efforts. "The good news is that people are talking about it. Now we need to take the conversation deeper and expand it."