Wedge strategy

Overview

The Wedge Document outlines a public relations campaign meant to sway public opinion, popular media, charitable funding agencies, and public policy makers. Its governing goals are to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies, and to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God. The strategy is divided into three phases: Scientific Research, Writing, and Publicity; Publicity and Opinion-making; and Cultural Confrontation & Renewal.

The institute affirms the strategy's Christian evangelistic orientation. Designed with five-year and twenty-year goals, the wedge strategy aims to achieve conversion of the mainstream and address perceived social consequences, promoting a social conservative agenda on issues including abortion, euthanasia, sexuality, and other social reform movements. It criticizes materialist reformers who advocated coercive government programs, calling them a virulent strain of utopianism.

Origins

Drafted in 1998 by Discovery Institute staff, the Wedge Document first appeared publicly after being posted to the World Wide Web on February 5, 1999, by Tim Rhodes, having been shared with him in late January 1999 by Matt Duss, then a part-time employee of a Seattle-based international human-resources firm. Duss had been given a document to copy titled The Wedge and marked Top Secret and Not For Distribution. Discovery Institute co-founder Stephen C. Meyer eventually acknowledged the Institute as the source.

The Institute still seeks to downplay its significance, calling it an urban legend, and portrays the scientific community's reaction as driven by Darwinist Paranoia. Despite insisting intelligent design is not creationism, the Institute chose to use an image of Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam. According to Phillip E. Johnson, the wedge movement began in 1992. In 1993, the Johnson-Behe cadre met at Pajaro Dunes, where Behe first presented the idea of irreducibly complex molecular machinery.

Nancy Pearcey acknowledges Johnson's leadership of the intelligent design movement, calling him the unofficial spokesman for ID. In his 1997 book Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, Johnson summed up the underlying philosophy. At the 1999 Reclaiming America for Christ Conference, Johnson gave a speech titled How the Evolution Debate Can Be Won, summing up the theological and epistemological underpinnings of intelligent design and its strategy.