The breakfast meetings, led by Meese, began in 2009 as an outgrowth of the Council for National Policy, a group founded 30 years ago by the Rev. Tim LaHaye, an evangelical minister, with the help of Paul Weyrich, an iconic conservative political organizer, sources said.

That year, the council brought in $1.8 million in total revenue and spent $139,000 on the activities of the breakfast meeting, dubbed the Conservative Action Project, according to the most recent documents filed with the IRS.

But the culture wars of the early 1980s that gave rise to the council have cooled, and Republicans in Congress are more focused on the budget and appeasing the fiscal conservatism of tea party activists.

A recent Washington Post survey of 650 tea party groups from around the country found that nearly all identified economic concerns as their top priority while almost none pointed to social issues.

Still, the champions of conservative social issues dismiss the notion that they have fallen off the radar of the Republican Party and the conservative grass roots. They argue that the recession has distracted voters, but their issues are intertwined with cutting government spending.

“The social and fiscal issues are locked in a tight political embrace,” said Phyllis Schlafly, who has been invited to the Meese meetings in the past. “You can’t talk about spending money without talking about the social issues. I mean, what are we spending the money on?”

Schlafly, who has been a leading voice for “traditional values” for decades, and other social conservatives point to legislative victories at the state level such as the laws defunding Planned Parenthood passed by legislatures in North Carolina and Wisconsin as evidence that the Christian right is alive and well.

The breakfast meeting participants often carry their ideas to two larger closed-door events later in the day, a midmorning meeting organized by antitax lobbyist Grover Norquist and the Weyrich Lunch, sponsored by several social-issue groups such as the Traditional Values Coalition. Together, the two meetings act as an off-the-record testing ground for conservative messaging and policy.