Wedge strategy
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The Wedge strategy is a political action treatise introduced in 1997 by the Discovery Institute, an organization that hopes to promote Intelligent Design as an alternative to evolutionary biology. The strategy outlines a future public relations campaign meant to sway the opinion of the public, popular media, funding agencies, and the scientific community in order that they should effect an "overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies".
There are three "wedge projects" refered in the strategy as three phases: Phase I: Scientific Research, Writing & Publicity, Phase II: Publicity & Opinion-making, and Phase III: Cultural Confrontation & Renewal. Each of these phases is designed to reach a governing goal of the Discovery Institute:
- 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.
The Wedge Strategy was designed with both five-year and twenty-year goals in mind in order to acheive 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 all of which are refered to as "a virulent strain of utopianism".
Beyond promotion of the Phase I goals of propoting 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 is hoped to embolden believers and sway the broader culture towards providing legitimacy of Intelligent Design.
In twenty-years, it is hoped by the group that they will have acheived their goal of making intelligent design "the dominant perspective in science" as well as to branch out to "ethics, politics, theology, and philosophy in the humanities, and to see its innuence in the fine arts". Ultimately, the goal of the Wedge Strategy is to see intelligent design "permeate religious, cultural, moral and political life."