An Image of God

"If there is a story long overdue for telling, surely it is the story of how and why the Catholic Church and its faithful stood against the eugenics movement at a time when just about everyone else had gotten on the pro-eugenics bandwagon. In An Image of God, Sharon M. Leon tells the story and tells it exceptionally well. The book is worth reading not only for what it teaches us about the past, but also for the lessons it imparts at a time when eugenics ideologies are being revived and presented in new rhetorical garb."

“Passionately argued, engagingly written, and based on extensive research, An Image of God will be essential reading for historians of eugenics and students of Catholic activism in the United States. With this book, Sharon M. Leon fills a huge gap in the scholarly literature.”

"Sharon M. Leon’s An Image of God deftly explores how modern American Catholic anti-eugenicists survived their own conflicts and stumbles to secure a substantial moral achievement for Catholic social teaching in a nation still often doubtful about Catholicism itself. This book is deeply researched and affectingly written; few books better illustrate the maturation of twentieth-century American Catholicism, especially in science, and the compromised choices that men and women seeking good often faced in their real and deficient world."

“This scholarly but very readable study cuts across several categories: the religious and legal aspects of sterilization; moral and ethical aspects of eugenics; the interplay of science and religion; and US and Catholic history in the first half of the twentieth century. . . . The author’s writing is clear, persuasive, and nuanced; her meticulous research, drawn from both original and secondary sources, is deep and thoroughly documented. . . . A valuable addition. . .”

“Popular commentary on the history of eugenics in America often operates at the level of cartoon, with anti-Darwinian religionists of many stripes posed against the forces of scientific materialism. Leon’s book provides an antidote to that kind of ahistorical polemic by showing in textured detail how the Catholic hierarchy as well as the laity struggled with the many-faceted seductions of eugenics.”

“No scholar has done more to document the relations between the US eugenics movement and the Roman Catholic Church than Leon. . . . Leon’s account of how the Church played a large role in defeating the eugenics movement is persuasive and eye-opening.”

“Rejecting the oversimplified and inaccurate trope of inherent Catholic hostility to science (though that language was sometimes used by eugenicists to describe their opponents), Leon shows how American Catholics mobilized against state laws permitting involuntary sterilization, highlighting abuses in existing laws, and calling into question some of the scientific claims about the hereditary nature of so-called feeble-mindedness. . . . An Image of God gives the reader some useful insight into how the historiography of eugenics and its opposition might need to be reconsidered. Perhaps its greater contribution is to our understanding of American Catholicism as an emergent political force in the early twentieth century, a development that has continued to shape the discussion of religion, biology, and politics in the twenty-first-century United States.”

“Essential reading for researchers with a specialist interest in Catholic opinions about bioethical issues, especially in twentieth-century America.”

“Adding depth and complexity to the history of eugenics in the United States, Leon’s work is a valuable contribution to the growing literature regarding Catholicism and science in the twentieth century.”