When it comes to landmark freedom-of-religion cases, Kitzmiller et al v Dover Area School District et al (nicknamed Kitzmiller v Dover) might be one of the most powerful recent ones. Almost 20 years ago, this decision stopped evangelicals from sneaking religious indoctrination into public schools. Its lengthy memorandum opinion (archive) also presents readers with an incredibly powerful rebuttal to every single claim made by the dishonest, hypocritical, control-hungry Christians involved in Creationism.
Recently, though, I’ve spotted evangelicals trying to sneak into public schools again. In Oklahoma, public schoolteachers may soon be required to teach Bible indoctrination in class (archive). Louisiana’s governor has illegally commanded public schools to post the Ten Commandments on their grounds (archive).
In the past, these dystopian hypocrites feared lawsuits. However, these evangelicals aren’t afraid anymore of getting dragged into court over their antics. In fact, they’re itching to get into a big court fight. They’re hoping that a conservative-heavy Supreme Court might rule to allow evangelicals to blatantly indoctrinate public schoolchildren during class hours.
Alas for them, evangelicals have forgotten all about the lessons they should have learned after Kitzmiller v Dover. Today, then, let us remind them that they should be very careful what they wish for.
Quick Rundown of Kitzmiller v Dover
Creationism is a hard-right Christian ideology that teaches that Yahweh used divine magic to create the entire universe and every living creature on Earth, including humans. Many flavors of Creationism exist (archive), but I suspect the most familiar form of it is Young-Earth Creationism (YEC). In YEC, Yahweh worked his magic over a period of six days about six thousand years ago. YEC denies that the Theory of Evolution explains how life on Earth looks like it does today. People who believe in YEC especially don’t like thinking that humans evolved at all, much less over a period of many millions of years.
Obviously, no material and objective facts, observations, or measurements support a single thing that YEC adherents believe. In fact, YEC groups no longer do any real science after their scientists kept figuring out that YEC can’t possibly be true.
Dover is a small town in Pennsylvania. In the very early 2000s, a pair of Young-Earth Creationists (YECs) won election to the Dover Area School District. Immediately, these two men (William “Bill” Buckingham and Alan Bonsell) began working to get their religious ideology into the district’s public science classes. The school district pinged the radar of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) in 2002, when somebody there ordered the burning of a student-painted mural depicting human evolution.
(During the trial, someone testified that she’d heard Buckingham mutter that he’d not only known about the incident but “gleefully watched it [the mural] burn.” After the mural’s destruction, Buckingham forbade any more murals depicting any kind of evolutionary process. He forced the school’s science teachers to acquiesce to this demand by making it the condition of his approval for them to buy new science textbooks. This testimony appears on Day 7 from Jen Miller. The incident shocked the judge!)
In 2004, the Dover school board demanded that public teachers teach Creationism as an alternate “theory” to explain life’s many forms on Earth. They issued Creationist textbooks called Of Pandas and People (“Pandas“) to science classrooms. Worse, they demanded that teachers downplay the scientific importance and tight coherence of the Theory of Evolution.
In response to this brazen religious overreach, eleven parents of children in the Dover Area School District filed suit with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 2004. The “Kitzmiller” in the lawsuit name refers to Tammy Kitzmiller, one of those parents. She got the ball rolling by calling the ACLU.
The case concluded in the plaintiffs’ favor in 2005.
NOTE: As you might guess, YEC is almost entirely an evangelical belief system. However, I’ve spotted some Catholic hardliners buying into it. (I’m betting they were Creationist evangelicals who then converted.) As well, other religions also teach their own Creationist histories (archive). In Kitzmiller v Dover, the YEC adherents involved were all evangelical, and I’ll be discussing them and their beliefs in an evangelical context. Also, although Creationists tried to rebrand their belief system as “Intelligent Design” in the late 1980s (archive), I see no reason to humor their dishonesty.
Kitzmiller v Dover was exactly the fight evangelicals thought they wanted
In 2016, the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) published a lengthy list of major court cases Creationists provoked—and generally lost (archive). Every one of them involves public schools. The last one occurred in 2005: Kitzmiller v Dover. There’s a reason for that.
Until Kitzmiller v Dover, Creationists had long seen court battles as a way to legitimize their overreach. Around 1998, they began work on what they called “the Wedge Strategy.” This was supposed to be a super-secret strategy guide for getting Creationism into public schools. Its creators, the Discovery Institute, planned to use “the Wedge document” to get more donations.
Alas for the Discovery Institute, the document leaked in 1999. The “culture-jammer” Tim Rhodes posted it to his website. At first, the Discovery Institute denied the entire existence of the Wedge Strategy. Eventually, though, they admitted to creating the document. That’s when we all learned that a key part of the Wedge Strategy involved provoking lawsuits. Theoretically they’d win these, thus securing themselves a foothold in public schools. In fact, Phase III of the Wedge specifically centers on public schools:
Phase III. Once our research and writing have had time to mature, and the public prepared for the reception of design theory, we will move toward direct confrontation with the advocates of materialist science through challenge conferences in significant academic settings. We will also pursue possible legal assistance in response to resistance to the integration of design theory into public school science curricula. The attention, publicity, and influence of design theory should draw scientific materialists into open debate with design theorists, and we will be ready.
Yes, hardline evangelicals have always understood the importance of getting access to children. Without being able to bypass the consent of children’s parents, their numbers will tank—and they know it. Public schools remain the very best place to find great numbers of children unaccompanied by their parents. So naturally, these predatory hypocrites focus hard on public classrooms. Grooming is A-OK if it’s for Jesus!
Perhaps they simply jumped the gun on Phase III. Their “research and writing,” outlined in Phase I, have always been hilariously poor-quality (archive; see also Hello, My Name is Kent Hovind). The public was (and is) far from “prepared for the reception of design theory,” which was supposed to be Phase II. But evangelical leaders tend to be eager to “move toward direct confrontation” with their tribalistic enemies. So Phase III, at least, was a go.
The trial Creationists ached to have—at last, at last, at last
If you’ve never read this court case’s Memorandum Opinion, I highly recommend you check it out. (Sources: Talk.Origins archive; La Wiki.) It’s kind of long, but it contains a lot of great information and science. It’s so good that I now consider it required reading for anybody interested in the cultural tug-of-war between real science and pseudoscience.
(For real history vs pseudohistory, I hold “Ancient Aliens Debunked” in the same high regard. I so, so, so wish the creator of it could apply those same critical thinking skills to his own religious beliefs.)
When the Dover parents filed their lawsuit, I saw Creationists gloating about their big chance to defeat the mean ol’ Darwinist evolutionists once and for all. Even five years before that (archive), they hadn’t been quite ready. But now, things looked very different. William Dembski, in particular, seemed very eager to testify on behalf of the school board’s Creationists. He had always trash-talked his opponents and lied to and about them. Now he’d get to do that in a court of law!
Additionally, Creationists were thrilled to learn that John E. Jones III, a United States District Judge, would be presiding over the trial. Jones was a Dubya appointee!
So evangelicals thought this was their absolute dream scenario. They would have their very best experts testifying and a judge they thought would be very sympathetic to their point of view and Jesus totally on their side. It was the fight of a lifetime. Creationists had ached to have this fight ever since a fundagelical lawyer had codified their entire ideology and movement back in the early 1990s (archive).
Oh yes. They were ready.
(Does this sound familiar? It should.)
… And what actually happened during Kitzmiller v Dover
If I told you about all the crazy stuff that happened during this lawsuit, we’d be here literally all day. It’s just too much. But here are some of the high points:
After posturing forever and ever about his planned testimony, William Dembski withdrew as a witness. He says he withdrew because of a dispute about payment with the fundagelical lawyers representing the Creationists. And Post-Darwinist, a Creationist blog, has another suspicion: Apparently, Dembski was editing a successor to the textbook at the heart of the Kitzmiller v Dover trial, Of Pandas and People, and he and his publisher were concerned about their intellectual property. Personally, though, I think Dembski just had some serious, sobering second thoughts about appearing in front of a federal judge and an opposing side that was loaded for bear.
It would have been nice to hear Jeffrey Shallit, a critic of Dembski’s, testify. But since Dembski withdrew, the defendants’ lawyers objected to Shallit testifying. They did not want him on the stand! After some back-and-forth, the plaintiffs’ lawyers agreed to let Shallit drop out. That didn’t stop Dembski from falsely claiming that Shallit withdrew because his testimony would have been embarrassing to the plaintiffs. What should be embarrassing is Dembski’s immaturity and dishonesty, but alas. Here’s the PDF of the legal document regarding the defendants’ fight to exclude Shallit. (On page 3, it quotes Dembski as withdrawing because he was afraid his testimony might hurt his career. I feel so vindicated!)
Oh, and Michael Behe was completely, utterly BTFO during his testimony. Though he’d written extensively about various “experiments” that Creationists could use to support their claims, it turns out he’d performed exactly none of them (and likely still hasn’t). In fact, he’d never published anything to any peer-reviewed science journals.
But the most dramatic moment in the entire case might be the one on Day 12pm. Behe had written in one of his books that scientists had “no answers to the question of the origin of the immune system.” In reply, the plaintiffs’ lawyer brought a huge stack of books and journals to Behe:
Every one of these 50-ish books and journals described, with evidence and experiments, how the immune system had evolved. Behe had read none of them, of course. Oh, and on Day 11pm, the opposing lawyer got Behe to say that his definition of science included not only Creationism but also astrology, ether theory, and geocentrism.
The Creationists on the Dover school board turned out to be liars. One of these stalwart TRUE CHRISTIANS™ got caught red-handed in a lie by that federal judge. And that judge got furious at him for it. On the morning of Day 18, Alan Bonsell took the stand. By the afternoon (search that link for “father”), Judge Jones exercised his prerogative to personally examine him. He took this unusual step because it’d become very obvious that Bonsell had lied about how the Dover school district had paid for their schools’ Creationist Pandas textbooks. Somehow, Bonsell avoided catching a perjury charge. But his reaction was priceless. Under Judge Jones’ angry questioning, Bonsell began “flapping his hands” and babbling nonsense.
One of the plaintiffs’ experts, Kenneth Miller, turned out to be a Christian himself. He’s written a number of books and textbooks about biology, including at least one used at the university level. On Day 1’s morning session (search for “dawkins”), Miller described how he didn’t see a conflict with his religious faith and the concept of evolution.
Kitzmiller v Dover expert uncovers some more interesting dishonesty from TRUE CHRISTIANS™
“CDESIGN PROPONENTSISTS,” Day 6. No discussion of Kitzmiller v Dover could exclude this infamous phrase. It derives from the extensive Pandas drafts reviewed by the plaintiffs’ expert on Creationist culture and history, Barbara Forrest, though I don’t think she actually talked about it.
See, in 1987 the Supreme Court’s decision in Edwards v Aguillard made Creationism officially off-limits to American public school teachers. In response, Creationists immediately changed their belief system’s name to “Intelligent Design” and began using this new name in the exact same way. They also began pretending all wide-eyed and innocent that gyarsh, Shaggy, they totally don’t specify Yahweh as the DESIGNER! So Intelligent Design can’t POSSIBLY be religious! Indeed, by 1993 Creationists had entirely stopped using the old name in their fake-science textbooks:
However, their Pandas drafts proved their undoing. In a draft of Pandas made right after that 1987 court decision, someone working on the book had done a search-and-replace of “Creation.” But they didn’t check each change, leading to “Creationists” turning into “cdesign proponentsists” like so:
Whoopsie doodles! A transitional form emerges!
Again, these drafts demonstrate very clearly that Creationists didn’t change anything at all about how they used the new name “Intelligent Design,” beyond stripping obviously Christian terminology from it.
That’s how Creationists disingenuously presented their belief system as a nonreligious alternative to the Theory of Evolution that could be legally taught to public schoolchildren. The new name created plausible deniability for the Christians lying their asses off for Jesus. Luckily, the judge wasn’t fooled.
Kitzmiller v Dover presented Creationists with a stunning loss
In every way conceivable, Kitzmiller v Dover decimated Creationist hopes.
Creationism by any name is not even remotely scientific. It is purely religious in nature. As any “objective observer” or even any “objective student” could tell, then, Creationism endorses religion in the public square.
Creationism has no secular purpose. This is likely how those wingnuts in Oklahoma and Louisiana are disingenuously rationalizing their demands to indoctrinate schoolchildren. In those cases, evangelicals present the Bible and Ten Commandments as historical documents and cultural touchstones rather than pretending their religious beliefs constitute real science. Hopefully, whoever presides over the forthcoming lawsuits will see right through these newer lies too.
The primary effect of Creationism is the advancement of religion. Judge Jones notes that Bonsell in particular had been trying to “inject religion into the Dover schools” starting in 2002. He also wanted to institute “school prayer,” but that was a secondary goal compared to Creationism. (Amusingly, the opinion paper also notes that Bonsell claimed he just couldn’t remember bringing up Creationism in 2003, though four other people recalled him doing so.) In fact, Bonsell had even told other people that he’d run for election to the school board specifically to inject Creationism, Bible study, evangelical revision of American history, and school prayer into public schools.
The judge discussed at length the various religious declarations Creationists in Dover, including the members of the school board like Buckingham and Bonsell (along with Buckingham’s wife), had made with regard to the district’s new science curriculum. Not a single one of these Creationists expressed concern with science education. Instead, they screeched evangelical talking points about the supposedly-nonexistent separation of church and state, America’s supposed founding as “a Christian nation,” and how the evil gubmint was destroying “the rights of Christians” like themselves. They all saw Creationism as a way to regain dominance over American culture.
None of the defendants presented any convincing evidence to support their claims of acting with secular motivation. Instead, the judge found it impossible to square their piously-recited secular motivations with the evidence. That evidence told him that the Dover school board had:
- “Consulted no scientific materials, scientists, or scientific organizations”
- “Failed to consider the views of the District’s science teachers,” all of whom had objected to the new Creationist demands
- “Relied solely on legal advice from two organizations with demonstrably religious, cultural, and legal missions, the Discovery Institute and the TMLC [Thomas More Law Center, the aforementioned fundagelical lawyers]”
- Decided to introduce “Intelligent Design” to science classrooms despite the fact that “most if not all of the Board members who voted in favor of the biology curriculum change conceded that they still do not know, nor have they ever known, precisely what ID [Intelligent Design] is”
Judge Jones called their attempt to sound secularly-motivated “ridiculous.” I also liked what he had to say about the defense’s witnesses, specifically including Buckingham and Bonsell:
Finally, although Buckingham, Bonsell, and other defense witnesses denied the reports in the news media and contradicted the great weight of the evidence about what transpired at the June 2004 Board meetings, the record reflects that these witnesses either testified inconsistently, or lied outright under oath on several occasions, and are accordingly not credible on these points.
We need a good Anger Translator for this judge.
How sour are those grapes, Creationists?
Almost immediately, Dover had an election for its school board. The voters decided to expel all of the current people on the board up for reelection and vote in new people.
Hilariously, William Dembski didn’t stop trash-talking his enemies. In response to the decision, he apparently released a video called “The Judge Jones School of Law,” featuring a number of people involved in the trial on the plaintiffs’ side (and Richard Dawkins, for some bizarre reason). The video originally featured these people farting instead of speaking. Very classy of these TRUE CHRISTIANS™! Very loving, so much turning of the other cheek! Jesus would definitely approve. Eventually, Dembski got tired of being teased for his hypocrisy and removed the farting from the video, it seems.
Strangely, Dembski also chose to set a framed portrait of Charles Darwin on Judge Jones’ desk in the video. I suppose Dembski wants to imply that the judge was biased, probably because he was one of those darn dirty Darwinists. Dembski’s also accused “Darwinian fascists” of preventing him from advancing Creationism rather than his own ineptitude and cowardice, so I guess baseless accusations are just his usual mode of operation.
Of course, Judge Jones is a fervent Christian, from what I could tell. And I’ve not heard of any real criticisms to how he handles his job, either. (I even wrote about him in 2014, when he struck down a state law forbidding same-sex marriage.) But that doesn’t matter to the people who are angry with his 2005 decision!
Phyllis Schlafly, infamous anti-feminist who somehow supported a career of attacking women’s rights by taking advantage of women’s rights, got really mad at the judge too. She said he’d “stuck the knife in the backs of those who brought him to the dance.” By “those who brought him to the dance,” she meant evangelical culture warriors. She saw her tribemates as the ones responsible for getting Jones his promotion from Dubya. In return, he’d refused to pander to them by issuing a bad decision so they could get on with the indoctrination of children in schools! How very dare he!
Delicious seething from our two main Creationists from the Dover school board!
In a Nova video about the trial, we see that Alan Bonsell is definitely still seething over Judge Jones’ callout. At 1:40:21 in the video copy I found on YouTube, he tries to rationalize and defend his behavior that fateful day:
“Never in a million years did I ever think- think that we’d- you know- I’d be in a federal lawsuit when I was on the school board or have the school district in something like that over a [holds up left index finger] one minute statement. [He begins waving his index finger around for emphasis.] A one minute statement.”
His partner in crime, the equally dishonest Bill Buckingham, also got a chance to rationalize his actions leading up to the lawsuit. Right after Bonsell speaks on-camera, we get Buckingham saying this:
“We weren’t asking the teachers to become, uh, priests or um, Protest- [pronunciation favors “Protestant”] pastors of some sort or lay ministers or anything like that. Just let the kids know the theories there! Let the kids do their own research and find answers for themselves!”
What a deflection! I can tell this guy’s done some time in ministry at some point. Firstly, as far as I know nobody accused the Creationists on the school board of wanting to make teachers into priests, pastors, or lay ministers. The plaintiffs accused them of wanting to teach religious indoctrination to public schoolchildren. That’s exactly what he and Bonsell wanted to do, but he weirdly doesn’t address that accusation.
Secondly, Creationists are not well known for letting children find their own answers to religious questions or, for that matter, do their own research. Creationism is about teaching children to obey authority figures and stop asking questions. So it’s very weird to see them making such an about-face when it comes to sneaking their beliefs into public schools.
The lasting legacy of the Kitzmiller v Dover case
In the New York Times right after the decision, Creationists insisted that the “long-term” effects of Judge Jones’ decision would be “limited.” Dembski in particular “predicted that intelligent design would become much stronger within 5 to 10 years.”
But they were as wrong about that as they’d been about Creationism being a valid secular science.
In fact, Creationism was now dead in the water. Judge Jones’ opinion paper had destroyed it, the horse it’d rode in on, the guy who’d sold the horse to it, and the little girl who’d once fed that horse carrots as a treat. He’d trampled its claims to secularity, while also exhaustively pointing out all of the ways in which it cannot be considered science.
Oh sure, Creationism still has a lot of adherents. Its shills sure haven’t needed to find day jobs. But it has no chance whatsoever anymore of entering science classrooms in public schools—except perhaps as an example of what pseudoscience looks like and how it can be identified.
In 2020, the NCSE published a post calling this lawsuit “the last gasp of ‘balancing’ evolution” (archive). Before Kitzmiller v Dover, Creationists had pushed for laws demanding that teachers try to balance real science with Creationism. That was what the Dover school board had tried. These bills’ language often featured phrases like “full range of views.”
By 2007, we learn from the NCSE’s post, Creationists had already almost completely abandoned that strategy. They began demanding instead that public schoolteachers present the “strengths and [imagined] weaknesses” of the Theory of Evolution. If Creationists couldn’t push their religious indoctrination into public schools’ classrooms, then they would at least attempt to knock real science down as a trustworthy explanation for the natural world.
(See also: The Last Ideology Standing. Creationism isn’t the only time evangelicals use this strategy.)
Evangelicals need to learn another harsh lesson, it seems
Perhaps evangelicals have completely forgotten the serious lessons Kitzmiller v Dover contained. Or perhaps they perceive pseudohistory as an easier sell to public classrooms than pseudoscience—and so do not comprehend that pseudohistory belongs to the same general category of religious stuff that doesn’t belong in a taxpayer-funded classroom. Maybe they think it’s a whole different “kind,” as post-Kitmiller Creationists now push about life on Earth (archive).
But it isn’t. The nakedly opportunistic and overtly religious nature of Christian pseudohistory will hopefully be as obvious to future judges as Creationism was to Judge Jones. Once evangelicals realize they won’t win with pseudohistory, hopefully whatever they devise afterward will fail too.
The one thing evangelicals can’t do is win through honesty and facts. Luckily for them, Jesus has told them personally that it’s okay to lie, cheat, and deceive others if they’re doing it to boost recruitment and retention numbers! What a great god! Sure, he won’t lift a finger to help the victims of child sex abuse. But at least he understands the much greater importance of sneaking indoctrination into taxpayer-funded schools to prey upon children without their parents’ consent!
NEXT UP: We’ll check out another potent sign of Christianity’s decline. See you soon!
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