Intelligent Design in Politics

The intelligent design movement has conducted an organized campaign largely in the United States that promotes a neo-creationist religious agenda calling for broad social, academic and political changes centering around intelligent design. A number of specific political strategies and tactics have been employed by intelligent design proponents. These range from attempts at the state level to undermine or remove altogether the presence of evolutionary theory from the public school classroom, to having the federal government mandate the teaching of intelligent design, to 'stacking' municipal, county and state school boards with intelligent design proponents. The Discovery Institute has been driving force in most cases, providing a range of support from material assistance to federal, state and regional elected representatives in the drafting of bills to supporting and advising individual parents confronting their school boards.

A feature of the Discovery Institute intelligent design campaigns has been extensive lobbying and public relations campaigns conducted on behalf of intelligent design proponents in order to overcome professional setbacks such as that of Guillermo Gonzalez, Richard Sternberg and Francis Beckwith. These efforts are focused on two efforts: the Teach the Controversy and Critical Analysis of Evolution campaigns. These campaigns gained prominence after the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial where Judge John E. Jones III ruled that teaching intelligent design or presenting it as an alternative to evolution was a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution because intelligent design is not legitimate science but essentially religious in nature.

Both the Teach the Controversy and Critical Analysis of Evolution strategies and resources for them come from the Discovery Institute and its Center for Science and Culture, the hub of the intelligent design movement. These strategies are seen as another iteration of the Discovery Institute's campaign to "defeat materialist world view" represented by the theory of evolution in favor of "a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions". According to the Center for Science and Culture's weblog, at least 10 state legislatures are now considering legislation reconsidering how evolution is taught. Many of these initiatives benefit from significant legal assistance from a number of conservative legal foundations including the Thomas More Law Center, the Alliance Defense Fund, and Quality Science Education for All (QSEA). All have litigated extensively on behalf of the movement.