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This chapter further examines Phase II of the Wedge Strategy and progresses to Phase III, “Cultural Confrontation and Renewal.” It opens with an analysis of the Discovery Institute’s use of misleading poll data gathered from commissioned public opinion polls conducted by Zogby International. The discussion of Phase III also includes the strategy of holding conferences at universities where Discovery Institute creationists confront mainstream scientists who follow the naturalistic methodology of modern science. Specific conferences are discussed, including the much-publicized 2000 “Nature of Nature Conference” at Baylor University. The chapter also explains the Discovery Institute’s legal strategy for getting intelligent design into public schools. It concludes with an account of William Dembski’s establishment of the now-defunct Michael Polanyi Center as an intelligent design think tank at Baylor, and his subsequent establishment of a “virtual” Polanyi Center, the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID).

Chapter 6 features descriptions of the most established academic institutes, centers, and programs for medical education and research on religion, faith, and spirituality in healthcare and healing. Beginning with the first program, established at Baylor in Houston, in the 1950s, these efforts continue through the present day. Current academic programs are described at leading universities including Duke, Emory, Harvard, Chicago, George Washington, and elsewhere. The specialized emphases and ongoing contributions of these respective programs and their directors, including Harold Koenig, are described in depth. The chapter also relates the key role of Dave Larson and John Templeton in institutionalizing content on religion and spirituality within undergraduate and graduate medical education in the United States.

In the mid-twentieth century leading scholars such as Reinhold Niebuhr or David Riesman wrote off conservative evangelical education as fading. William McLoughlin also saw the new revival movements as ephemeral. Billy Graham and Carl Henry had ambitions to start a major university around 1960 but did not have the resources. Wheaton College in Illinois, the leading ex-fundamentalist college, began to rise academically despite the anti-intellectualism of its tradition. Calvin College had been an ideologically isolated Reformed school but by the 1960s had produced leading Christian philosophers. Intervarsity Christian Fellowship helped raise consciousness regarding strong scholarship, and by 2000 the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities had grown to over one hundred schools with well-trained faculties. Like-minded Christian scholars founded their own academic societies. Baylor University became an intentionally Christian research university. Evangelical Protestant and Catholic scholars often cooperated. Despite many challenges, distinctly Christian scholars could hold their own in twenty-first-century academia.

All over the world, critiques of the silences imposed by public archives have led to movements to establish “counter-archives” or “identity archives” presenting the perspective of particular groups. One example is the Keston Archive and Library, a collection of religious samizdat and documents on the situation of Soviet believers compiled by the Anglican priest Michael Bourdeaux in Great Britain, and currently housed at Baylor University. Keston is a counter-archive not only in terms of its content, but also in its way of organizing and cataloging records. Rather than following the archival principle of provenance, reflecting the bureaucratic agencies that created records, the collection is organized by subject. By preserving the subject categories that interested an original group of users, the archive itself becomes a historical source on the role of Western readers and advocates in shaping our views of religious life in the Soviet Union.

By the turn of the twentieth century, a cohort of clerical activists, plagued by notions of a widespread spiritual crisis, realized that religious authority in public life could be bolstered by the construction of new and powerful denominational bureaucracies, the pursuit of moral reforms such as prohibition, and by tackling head on the widely held anticlerical fears confronting religious activism in public life. Activists such as Methodist minister George C. Rankin would learn, for instance, that reclaiming historical memory—abolishing hostile associations with witch trials and inquisitions–could convince more and more Texans that government could—and should—be run along religious lines. Moral reform was only the most public manifestation of a brewing clerical movement that targeted the popular religious attitudes of everyday southerners to enable the construction of the Bible Belt.