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Well, the who part is most likely one or more people with very high stakes on having a large following of devout believers, enriching their pockets or boosting their personal power base. The more that their own religious beliefs are pushed onto the general populace at a young and vulnerable age, then the larger their long-term following will be.

While there's clearly never been any shortage of genuinely sociopathically malicious religious leaders, I think one of the reasons religion has survived so long in society is that it makes people act in these ways -- spreading the gospel, evangelising the young -- while all the time believing they're being beneficent to society. IMO one needn't posit a secret conspiracy of ID zealots: a drowning man will clutch at straws, the saying goes, and ID looks to me like the sort of straw that a theist drowning in rationalism would clutch at. It's probably popular in its own right, not because of aggressive marketing.

Peter