Wedge Strategy - Overview

Overview

The Wedge Document outlines a public relations campaign meant to sway the opinion of the public, popular media, charitable funding agencies, and public policy makers. According to critics, the wedge document, more than any other Discovery Institute project, demonstrates the Institute's and intelligent design's political rather than scientific purpose.

The document sets forth the short-term and long-term goals with milestones for the intelligent design movement, with its governing goals stated in the opening paragraph:

• "To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies"
• "To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God"

There are three Wedge Projects, referred to in the strategy as three phases designed to reach a governing goal:

• Scientific Research, Writing & Publicity
• Publicity & Opinion-making
• Cultural Confrontation & Renewal

Recognizing the need for support, the institute affirms the strategy's Christian, evangelistic orientation:

Alongside a focus on the influential opinion-makers, we also seek to build up a popular base of support among our natural constituency, namely, Christians. We will do this primarily through apologetics seminars. We intend these to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidences that support the faith, as well as to popularize our ideas in the broader culture.

The wedge strategy was designed with both five-year and twenty-year goals in mind in order to achieve the conversion of the mainstream. One notable component of the work was its desire to address perceived social consequences and to promote a social conservative agenda on a wide range of issues including abortion, euthanasia, sexuality, and other social reform movements. It criticized "materialist reformers advocated coercive government programs" which it referred to as "a virulent strain of utopianism".

Beyond promotion of the Phase I goals of proposing Intelligent Design related research, publications, and attempted integration into academia, the wedge strategy places an emphasis on Phases II and III advocacy aimed at increasing popular support of the Discovery Institute's ideas. Support for the creation of popular level books, newspaper and magazine articles, op-ed pieces, video productions, and apologetics seminars was hoped to embolden believers and sway the broader culture towards acceptance of intelligent design. This in turn would lead the ultimate goal of the wedge strategy; a social and political reformation of American culture.

In 20 years, the group hopes that they will have achieved their goal of making intelligent design the main perspective in science as well as to branch out to ethics, politics, philosophy, theology, and the fine arts. A goal of the wedge strategy is to see intelligent design "permeate religious, cultural, moral and political life." By accomplishing this goal the ultimate goal as stated by the Center for Science and Culture (CSC) of the "overthrow of materialism and its damning cultural legacies" and reinstating the idea that humans are made in the image of God, thereby reforming American culture to reflect conservative Christian values, will be achieved.

The preamble of the Wedge Document is mirrored largely word-for-word in the early mission statement of the CSC, then called the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. The theme is again picked up in the controversial book From Darwin to Hitler authored by Center for Science and Culture Fellow Richard Weikart and published with the center's assistance. The wedge strategy was largely authored by Phillip E. Johnson, and features in his book The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism.