The Devil in Dover: An Insider's Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-town America

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The page-turning story behind the 2005 intelligent design case in Dover, Pennsylvania—the case that made front-page news around the world.

"What happened in Dover is a tiny sliver, a broken shard of glass mirroring what plays out across the country. A war of fundamentalist Christian values versus secularism. A battle between evangelical fanaticism and tolerance."—from The Devil in Dover

In December 2004, following the Dover area school board's decision to teach intelligent design in ninth-grade biology classrooms, eleven parents sued, sparking a federal constitutional challenge. Lauri Lebo, a small-town reporter who covered the trial, knows not just the legal case and science, but the people on all sides of the divisive battle.

In The Devil in Dover, Lebo traces the compelling backstory of this pivotal case described by some as a perfect storm of religious intolerance, First Amendment violations, and an assault on American science education. In a community divided across unexpected lines, the so-called activist judge, a George Bush-appointed Republican, eventually condemned the school board's decision as one of "breathtaking inanity."

Lebo follows the story through its surprising twists, pondering whether this was a national war playing out in a small town or a small-town political battle playing out on the national stage. As a "local girl" with a fundamentalist Christian father, Lebo provides an account that is both fascinating and moving, as she thoughtfully probes one of America's most divisive cultural conflicts—and the responsibility journalists have when covering such a controversial story.

Customer Reviews: Read 18 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

A Remarkable, Poignant, and Vivid Account of the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Trial as Told By a Local Journalist May 5, 2008
78 out of 88 found this review helpful

If Fundamentalist Protestant Christian religious zealots Alan Bonsell and Bill Buckingham had sought to introduce the teaching of Intelligent Design in the biology classrooms of New York City's Stuyvesant High School, then theirs would have been an utterly spectacular failure, recognized by many as a blatantly brazen attempt in injecting religion into science classrooms. Why? Though in recent years Stuyvesant High School may be better known as the high school where best-selling memoirist Frank McCourt taught English and creative writing for nearly two decades, the school itself has a nearly century-old reputation as America's foremost high school devoted to the sciences, mathematics and engineering; the prestigious alma mater of such distinguished alumni as the late Joshua Lederberg - one of the school's four Nobel Prize laureate alumni - former president of Rockefeller University and a leading pioneer of molecular biology, mathematician and University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer, political pundit Dick Morris, molecular biologist Eric Lander, leader of one of the two teams which sequenced successfully the human genome, and physicists Brian Greene and Lisa Randall. Neither its principal (who has vowed in public that Intelligent Design will never be taught there as long as he serves), nor its faculty, nor its parents would have permitted it. Furthermore, had sixty copies of Intelligent Design "textbook" "Of Pandas and People" appeared suddenly in the school's library, I am certain that some enterprising students might have used them in a "scientific experiment" testing their buoyancy in the briny waters of the Hudson River (For an insightful look at Stuyvesant High School itself, I strongly encourage readers to buy my friend Alec Klein's "A Class Apart", which is available for purchase here at Amazon.com. In the interest of full disclosure, both Klein and I are fellow alumni of Stuyvesant High School and Brown University.).

Located in the southeastern corner of the state of Pennsylvania, the small rural town of Dover is not New York City; its high school, Dover High School, probably doesn't come close to matching Stuyvesant's celebrated academic excellence. Nor does the town of Dover resemble, even remotely, New York City's cosmopolitan religious and ethnic diversity. Instead, Dover is located in Pennsylvanian Dutch country, and, like much of the United States, part of a Fundamentalist Protestant Christian "Bible Belt" in which most of its citizens are devout Christians who strongly believe in the Bible's literal truth, and they regard, with ample suspicion and hostility, an "atheistic" idea like Darwin's Theory of Evolution via Natural Selection. In such an environment, it isn't surprising that former Dover Area School District board members Bonsell and Buckingham succeeded in persuading the board to adopt a policy sympathetic to the teaching of Intelligent Design. However, it is surprising that they did so contrary to the wishes of Dover High School's science faculty, who clearly understood that theirs was a deceitful effort towards introducing a religious doctrine (Intelligent Design) into the high school's 9th grade biology classrooms. Indeed, much later, at the conclusion of the Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial, Judge John E. Jones III would harshly condemn the Dover Area School District board for ignoring the sound advice of these teachers and acting against their wishes.

Among the many reporters covering the six week-long Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial in the Fall of 2005, the finest included several local reporters, such as York Daily Record's education reporter Lauri Lebo, whose "beat" covered the First Amendment issues raised by the Dover Area School Board's advocacy of Intelligent Design. Now, in "The Devil in Dover", Lauri Lebo has written a terse, but quite compelling, personal account of the trial, told from the perspective of someone who knew many of those involved in the unfolding legal drama (For example, she mentions Bill Buckingham in the acknowledgements section of her book, still counting him as a friend simply because of their mutual admiration for bluegrass music and his excellence as a raconteur.). It is an intensely personal account, since Lebo had to wrestle with personal demons, both during and after the trial, hoping to reconcile herself to her father, a "Born Again" Fundamentalist Protestant Christian, and the owner of the local radio station devoted exclusively to "Christian" programming. It is also a splendidly written account, replete with a simple, almost poetic, prose style, that could remind readers of Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes" in its sincerity. It is also the most riveting account I have read yet of the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District trial, and one which deserves to take its place alongside Edward Humes' "Monkey Girl" and Matthew Chapman's "40 Days and 40 Nights" as the finest books published so far on the trial itself.

Lebo quickly introduces us to those on the Dover Area School District board like Bonsell and Buckingham, who were passionately advocating Intelligent Design, without making a serious effort in trying to understand it and in determining whether it was truly a "viable" scientific alternative to contemporary evolutionary theory. Indeed, I am delighted that Lebo also provides a remarkably complete summary of the origins of the Intelligent Design movement, mentioning briefly the now infamous "Wedge Document", whose crypto-Fascist objectives included the successful introduction of Intelligent Design "theory" into science classrooms throughout the United States; her coverage only lacks the ample detail and insightful analysis of the movement that is found in Edward Humes' "Monkey Girl". She suggests that the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks evoked a strong spiritual reawakening among many Americans, especially those in Dover, creating a political and cultural atmosphere which led inexorably to a school board quite sympathetic to the teaching of Intelligent Design in Dover High School's science classrooms, even if its members were only vaguely familiar with its principal tenets like the concept of "Irreducible Complexity". Hers is an appealing, quite compelling, argument, but one I am quite skeptical of, for several reasons, the least of which is recognizing that Intelligent Design creationism and other kinds of creationism had enjoyed ample support among Fundamentalist Protestant Christians long before the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks. I had known people like Alan Bonsell and Bill Buckingham many years before, as a Brown University undergraduate, within its Campus Crusade for Christ campus chapter membership; many of its leaders were friends, with whom I had much in common politically, while ignoring our radically divergent interests in science and religion. Indeed, I became the "token" "Darwinist" on an "Ad Hoc Committee on Origins" which sponsored a "Creation Science vs. Evolution" debate held at Brown's hockey rink, between Henry Morris, the president of the San Diego-based Institute for Creation Research, and Ken Miller, a young assistant professor of biology, who had recently returned to his undergraduate alma mater (The debate resembled a religious revival meeting of the kind described so vividly by Lebo, since most of those present were from Fundamentalist Protestant Christian churches in Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts.).

It is clear from Lebo's compelling saga that the Dover Area School District board, led by the likes of Bonsell and Buckingham, was "boldly going" where no other school board had gone before, in its blatant effort at injecting Christianity into Dover High School science classrooms during the summer and fall of 2004. A board that was ignoring not only the educational guidance provided by veteran teacher Berta Spahr and her Dover High School science colleagues, but also defying the wishes of its own attorneys, who recognized the potentially perilous course that the board was undertaking towards a potential First Amendment lawsuit against itself. Not only a potential First Amendment lawsuit, but also potential charges of perjury loomed, after several board members, including Bonsell and Buckingham, denied under oath that "creationism" was discussed at several acrimonious board meetings, which were covered by two of Lebo's York Daily Record colleagues and another journalist from a local television station. They also refused to admit, again under oath, how sixty copies of the Intelligent Design textbook "Of Pandas and People" were purchased from money raised via a "private" church donation. Lebo deftly switches back and forth between the board's shenanigans to the potential interest shown in its activities from the National Center for Science Education, the Discovery Institute, and the Thomas More Law Center, whose attorneys would serve as the board's principal defense attorneys during the Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial.

Without question, the most riveting portions of "The Devil in Dover" are Lebo's extensive recollections of the trial testimony itself. Reading her version of events during Ken Miller's cross examination by defense attorney Patrick Gillen and Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe's bizarre exchanges with lead plaintiff attorney Eric Rothschild over the very definition of science and the evolutionary implications of immunology, one is left indelibly with a strong impression of how important these testimonies were in Judge Jones' well-reasoned, and well-stated, decision; a decision that was not replete with instances of "plagiarism" and "judicial activism" - as many Intelligent Design creationists and other creationists have contended frequently here at Amazon.com, their own websites like Bill Dembski's Uncommon Descent, and elsewhere - but instead, a brilliant legal document which underscored Jones' keen understanding of what constituted valid science - contemporary evolutionary theory - and why Intelligent Design was really a fraudulent idea whose primary aim was to inject "Christian" religious values into science classrooms. Yet the "missing link" that tied Intelligent Design to religion, was unearthed by philosopher Barbara Forrest in a brilliant piece of detective work; her courtroom testimony may be the most compelling that I have read from any of the books devoted to this trial.

In "The Devil in Dover", Lauri Lebo demonstrates how she became a committed journalist interested in reporting only the truth, ignoring the pleas from her editors to offer "balance" between the opposing sides. A commitment for which she paid dearly in losing the trust and respect of her father, and then, finally, her decades-old job as a local newspaper reporter. But a superb commitment in support of the truth that we, the public, should salute Lauri Lebo for her ample courage and determination in putting an end to "The Devil in Dover". Hers is a book which deserves a wide readership, especially since the Discovery Institute is still aggressively pursuing its crypto-Fascist Wedge Strategy, as though it was some latter day group of Visigoths, Vandals and Huns, seeking to destroy all that is noble and just in Western Civilization. Oddly enough, by mere coincidence, not by "Intelligent Design", it is being published mere weeks after the debut of Ben Stein's pathetic cinematic mendacious intellectual pornography, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed", which contends that there is a virulent mainstream scientific "witch hunt" against Intelligent Design advocates, and equates most odiously, "Darwinism" with Nazism. "The Devil in Dover" also deserves ample critical acclaim as one of the best books published this year; it is truly a spellbinding affirmation of my apt description of Intelligent Design as mendacious intellectual pornography.

5 out of 5 stars

At home in Dover May 6, 2008
52 out of 60 found this review helpful

I received my copy of Lauri Lebo's "The Devil in Dover" last night, and I am sorry that I have finished it. It was a fast read. Lebo's work stands out among the other books written about the Dover Panda Trial for the strongly personal nature of the book. This stems from both her familiarity with all the Dover locals, but even more personally, agnostic Lebo uses the trial as a mirror to her personal relationship to her fundamentalist father and doing so illuminates both. After the trial was over and the news vans packed off to the next story, Lebo stayed because Dover is her home, and "The Devil in Dover" is as much her story as any other participants.

If you are more interested in a book that places intelligent design and the Dover trial in the context of America's struggle over creationism and science, Edward Humes, "Monkey Girl" (2007 New York: Harper Collins) will probably be more to your liking. And Matthew Chapman's 2007 book, "40 Days and 40 Nights" (New York: Harper Collins), has a clearer focus on the legal machinations. But neither of them can come close to Lebo's understanding of the Dover school board's character, the plaintiff parents or the citizens of Dover.

5 out of 5 stars

A humanizing account of a battle against religious intolerance June 9, 2008
26 out of 33 found this review helpful

I had been steadily working on analysis of an experiment that I will be presenting later this month, but Sunday afternoon a line of thunderstorms blew through here, and somewhere in there the power went out. My work laptop runs out of juice quickly when running Avida, so that's closed up. There's only so much playing with the puppy that I can handle at a time, and somehow I feel a need to do something.

Several of my fellow bloggers at the Panda's Thumb have been talking about journalist Lauri Lebo's new book, "The Devil in Dover". There's about five who say that they are in various stages of writing reviews to be blogged here, there, or published in the mainstream media. And they all, to a man (yes, all of them are male), love it. About ten days ago, Lauri Lebo even gave me a personally inscribed copy (I contributed a photo for the front of the dust cover design and set up her personal website for the book). I hadn't gotten around to actually reading the book, though, until the lights and power went out, reducing my options. But I have to say that the book is good enough to wish for a power outage. I have remedied that piece of ignorance with the help of a flashlight and a couple of changes of battery and can now speak to the content in the about two hours that my personal laptop has available in its battery charge.

The first thing to say is that Lauri's book (and I do hope that I am not unjustly taking liberties in our acquaintance to say "Lauri") is not just a journalist's compilation of data, but rather an intensely personal book. There are several threads of personal involvement that Lauri takes up here. Perhaps the most touching is her relationship and estrangement from her father, who converted to fundamentalist Christianity several years ago and persistently searched for signs that Lauri would also be "born again" as he had been. But also there is the personal struggle with those in her profession who misconstrue journalistic "objectivity" perversely as a charge not to speak the truth when a situation indicates that a "side" is plainly in the wrong.

And that leads to the second thing to say about Lauri's book here, which is that as a local reporter and acquaintance of most of the principal dramatis personae of the Dover-area Kitzmiller v. DASD dustup, Lauri delivers what will likely stand as the closest approach to getting inside the shoes of not only the plaintiffs, but several of the defendants as well. In particular, Lauri was able to relate to Bill Buckingham, infamous as the school board member that even the Thomas More Law Center (TMLC) repudiated, in a way that got beyond the blunt and confrontational style he was known for in the months leading up to the lawsuit. The TMLC betrayal led Buckingham to the brink of suicide, Lauri reports, and then to his early resignation from the Dover school board. Lauri's descriptions of Buckingham's frailties and foibles don't gloss over or diminish his truly monstrous behavior, but they do lend a humanizing touch to someone otherwise known primarily or only for his unswerving intolerance of the religious views of others.

The third thing to say about Lauri's book is that she has managed to pretty well linearize a complex storyline involving parallel actions by many players, and this is no mean task. One can have, in a few hours of reading, an excellent overview of the chronology of events going back to tension in 2002 over a student-painted mural depicting human evolution and displayed prominently in a science classroom at Dover High School, and up to the period around the filing of the decision by Judge Jones. The centerpiece of this is the condensation of the events in the courtroom during the trial itself, for which Lauri relates that she had a front-row jury-box seat. She relates here the testimony of the plaintiffs as they had to relate to the court what harm they had suffered as a result of the school district's "intelligent design" policy. In the cases of Fred Callahan and Cyndi Sneath, these are revealed as piquant moments of eloquence and directness in the courtroom, rebutting the defense contention that the policy's statement in the classroom was brief, modest, and without further issue.

The plaintiffs's expert witnesses awoke interest and respect from the journalists, while the defense's primary expert, Michael Behe, managed to turn off almost everyone present during his direct testimony. Lauri's description of the abrupt return from boredom as Eric Rothschild cross-examined Behe is worth the price of the book, laying bare the platitudes and sound bites Behe had come to rely upon as a facade resting upon, well, nothing. And here one encounters something that Lauri exposes through the book, and that is the obliviousness of the Dover school district's "intelligent design" advocates and their chosen defenders to how their statements and actions were taken by others. In Behe's case, Behe left the courtroom apparently well-convinced of having given a sterling performance, though later Lauri filed her story and was remonstrated with by her editor to lead with something positive for the defense's case that day. "No, they did nothing," she said, "Rothschild eviscerated them."

The courtroom provided the denouement for the tragi-comic story of the principal "intelligent design" advocates on the school board who chose to lie rather than expose their policy to a possible temporary restraining order. The depositions of those people taken in early January, 2005 provided clear evidence that Bill Buckingham and Alan Bonsell purposely concealed information pertaining to the purchase of 60 copies of the "intelligent design" textbook, "Of Pandas and People". Steven Harvey provided the courtroom confrontation between established fact and the defense witnesses' impossible prevarications. Lauri notes again the apparent obliviousness of the witnesses to their peril, though Alan Bonsell apparently came to some realization there in the witness stand under grilling from Judge Jones himself. I think Sheila Harkins dodged a bullet here, as Lauri's description of the school board president's testimony again documents that oblivious trait, but mercifully does not convey the full bizarre spectacle that Harkins conveyed as a witness. I happened to be there, am not that merciful, and was dumbfounded that any attorney could have so ill-prepared a witness for giving testimony. Harkins chewed gum throughout her time in the stand, fidgeted nearly constantly, and sometimes answered questions while holding her face in one or both hands.

The lawyers of the Thomas More Law Center did not go unobserved. Lauri provides descriptions of their part in the affair from fomenting the Dover school board's participation in a "revolution against evolution" through their sometimes lackluster courtroom performance. In particular, Richard Thompson is revealed as a man on a mission to whom all others are secondary considerations, including the people that his law firm agreed to "shield" from legal challenge. Thompson's sole concern, as related in the book, was putting a court record together to take to the Supreme Court. Given this view, it is perhaps understandable that TMLC did not take the same sort of care in preparing their witnesses that the plaintiffs' attorneys did. The witnesses weren't the real issue for Thompson, so poor posture and failure to enunciate were apparently simply not on the defense legal team radar as things to avoid. That's on the minor side; on the major side is what role, if any, did TMLC have in the concerted effort by the school board advocates for "intelligent design" to deny the plain truth that they had come to their position by first looking to incorporate creationism in the science classroom. Lauri's conclusion is unfortunately true, that we may never know what went on there, but the outcome was to propel Dover into the national spotlight.

A fourth thing to say about Lauri's book is that Lauri is a masterful wordsmith and constantly comes up with descriptive gems. Her verbal acumen coupled with her comprehensive knowledge of the local milieu gives us an account that is a pleasure to delve into.

"My mother taught me to love the smell of puppies' milk breath, and the feel of their bellies taut and round like hard-boiled eggs. She taught me to stretch out, my face pressed in the grass, the laundry snapping above me on the clothesline, to indulge the drowsy feeling of sunshine on the back of my head."

"My father pointed to the sky at night and taught me to dream of infinity. On hot summer evenings, he wrestled with his children, like kittens, in the grass until long after teh sun went down. Then we lay on our backs in the grass and watched the stars. I'd shine a flashlight into the sky, gazing at the beam of light disappearing into the dark. Millions and millions of years from now that light will reach those stars, my father told me. I'd try to follow the beam with my eyes and ponder this until I grew dizzy."

Are there errors in the book? Of course, any book length project will collect its share of those. Most of these fall into the category of quibbles, as in Lauri referring to the National Center for Science Education's "Project Steve" as "Project Steve Steve". The other class of error is one that follows from the fact that the book is short. There simply is not enough space here to recount the involvement of all the people who contributed in some way to the remarkable events in Dover and Harrisburg in 2004 and 2005, nor to fully document those who are mentioned in the book. Lauri's choices here play to her strengths in having the local background, and this combination of focus and brevity brings a cohesion to the book that balances the cost of excluding various actors from a chance at the stage. Those would include defense experts Scott Minnich and Steve Fuller, whose testimony goes unremarked in the book, or the various disappearing defense witnesses, who either get brief mentions in other contexts or who go wholly without notice here.

But the book was not intended to be an encyclopedia entry, and it brings home the human experience of having to confront religious intolerance when one cares deeply about the intolerant people. It is an easy path to demonize or villainize those who chose intolerance as their approach, and Lauri avoids this simplification. The book begins and ends with Lauri's prickly and ultimately unresolved relationship with her father, who died days after the decision in the case came down. The bond of love between the two is manifest, and in some way prepares us to see that even for the rest of the folks pushing things they shouldn't, that they have a reason in their unreason to take the course they do. Conceding to their demands for intolerance is not an option, and Lauri celebrates the resolve of those who challenged the Dover school board's "breathtaking inanity" while respecting the dignity of those who partook in the inanity. It's a deeply moving account, and if you haven't yet read it, it is time to put it on your list, buy it for a friend or loved one, and otherwise pass along the word that here is a read that is both challenging and rewarding.

Do it now. Don't wait, like me, for a power outage.

5 out of 5 stars

reporting at its best July 11, 2008
23 out of 23 found this review helpful

This is a powerful and wonderfully-told story--but in many ways it's a very sad story. Lebo points out that Pennsylvania has one of the strongest religious freedom constitutional guarantees in the country. This states (in part) "no human authority can, in any case whatever, control or interfere with the rights of conscience, and no preference shall ever be given by law to any religious establishments or modes of worship." After the decision, the right and the Christian right--or rather, I should say, those who like to call themselves the Christian right--bitterly assailed the judge as an "activist" working against the constitution, and the plaintiffs and much of the media for being anti-God.

Lebo was a local person: she knew many of the people. She has integrity, which as she relates, often worked to her detriment in the trial. Her boss seemed very concerned at times: he wanted Lebo's reporting to make it seem as if the drama that was playing out in the courtroom was going equally well for both sides, when clearly such was not the case. Maybe the sports section would have had a headline "Penn State Slips Past Dover State 92-0", although the Dover trial was not quite that lopsided [63-3 is more realistic, perhaps]. Lebo describes her father, a fundamentalist, who often makes the same joke about the ACLU being the "American Communist Lawyers Union", a minister who believes that anyone who does not accept the entire Bible literally cannot ever be called a Christian, and others on both sides. Many of the plaintiffs showed great courage--vituperative attacks on their children at school, death threats, and the like. So what you get is a very personal view of the case--something virtually impossible for an outsider to achieve.

There's a lot of disillusionment for Lebo--seeing reporters she knows and respects accused of lying about what was said at school board meetings and threatened with jail--defamation by supposedly Christian people who claimed the Bible as their guide, but who showed no hesitation in committing perjury for their cause. Lebo remembers asking herself plaintively "How can they lie like that in Christ's name?" When videotape contradicts sworn testimony, you have a problem, as Judge Jones certainly did. There's a wealth of detail about the testimony on both sides, and the view of the community is compelling reading. A fine book, powerfully told!

5 out of 5 stars

Fascinating and thoughtful June 9, 2008
19 out of 23 found this review helpful

It was a very compelling read. That's particularly impressive when you consider the subject matter, and how easily a lesser writer could have become bogged down in legal and scientific descriptions that would baffle a layman like myself.

The issues in themselves are fascinating and important. But Ms. Lebo's ability to succinctly characterize the major players kept me reading. An affecting account of Ms. Lebo's attempts to connect with her fundamentalist father in the midst of the trial adds considerable emotional heft to the book.

In Ms. Lebo's writing, you can see a genuine kindness of spirit. She's appropriately forthright in calling out the liars and manipulators in the story. Yet she has an apparently sincere desire not only to out them, but to understand them as well -- to make a connection that will allow for actual communication.

At a time when so much public discourse consists of little more than shrill accusations and insults, that's good to see.

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