executive director of both the Society of Christian Ethics, the Black Religious Scholars Group and is co-founder of the Society of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion. She has published ten books including Religion, Race, and COVID-19: Confronting White Supremacy in the Pandemic and The Altars Where We Worship: The Religious Significance of Popular Culture.
Floyd-Thomas applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, When the Good Life Goes Bad: The US and Its Seven Deadly Sins, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about When the Good Life Goes Bad at the University of Illinois Press website.Understanding pride as the doctrinal dimension of the American good life is essential for distinguishing between the projections and shadows that myths cast. The American discipline of education and schooling produces knowledge that shapes what Americans consider to be good. In short, American education has long indoctrinated Americans to accept social and cultural norms (aka assumptions and lies) about themselves and others as fact. Pride or “knowledge without character” is the process by which Americans presume and impose the supremacy of their worldview to the exclusion of all others. Through an analysis of knowledge production and dissemination, this chapter explores the ways in which the privileged perspectives of some become the normalizing process by which the general public comes to believe in these death- dealing ideologies as they order our world.Page 99 appears in a chapter that frames “pride” as a doctrinal dimension of the American good life.
In Christocentric terms, pride is the pinnacle of human hubris, whereby we focus on our own ability, an ability often rooted in delusions of grandeur. Where Hebrews 11:1 articulates that Christian faith is trusting in the divine, pride substitutes our own self-aggrandizing feats and self- serving facts as the source of the “assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen.” Philosopher David Hume assesses pride as a pleasant sensation and humility as a painful one. Many wise people have deemed pride to be the greatest of sins. Specifically, American pride emanates from American nationalism and the alleged magnanimity of the United States as a first world power. Many in the world regard the United States as a country proud in the extreme and profoundly lacking in national self-awareness. Take, for example, “Make America Great Again” as a political motto whose adherents exhibit their reluctance or inability to learn moral lessons from past great empires and to gauge its historical significance relative to them. American pride is founded upon Gandhi’s blunder of “knowledge without character.”
Rather than doing the hard work of gaining an enlightened, historically informed understanding of their nation, Americans have been indoctrinated to believe that self-knowledge is more about trusting their feelings of superiority, whether based on nationality, race, gender, sexuality, class, or ability. As a result, the goal of establishing and advancing common ideals such as fellowship, freedom, and flourishing is ignored. In short, America’s system of knowledge production privileges the national functionality of its citizens to the detriment of their national character and moral formation. The rising intolerance in the United States for critical reflection and analysis has coddled the American mind and compromised its ability to search for wisdom and to question untruths.
The core of the text is actually revealed on this page! A browser opening to page 99 would get a good idea of what When the Good Life Goes Bad is doing. The book is a theological and moral critique of the stories that shape American identity, and page 99 shows the engine of that critique: pride as “knowledge without character,” where confidence outruns wisdom and inherited assumptions get treated as fact. It also captures how I read culture as formation. Education and “knowledge production” are not neutral; they can function like catechesis, training citizens into “normal” ways of seeing and then baptizing those perspectives as universal.
I write as a theologian listening to public life. Scripture and moral philosophy sit beside the everyday habits that form us—what we celebrate, what we ignore, what we call “common sense.” If page 99 resonates, it may be because you recognize the feeling it names: certainty that isn’t wisdom, confidence that isn’t character. The page also signals a Christocentric contrast. Hebrews 11:1 describes faith as trust oriented toward God; pride replaces that trust with self-aggrandizing achievements, national myths, and self-serving “facts,” producing a certainty that resists correction. Readers will also see that this pride is not merely personal. It is communal and political—bound up with nationalism, privilege, and the way one group’s worldview becomes the standard by which everyone else is measured.
What page 99 cannot supply, on its own, is the book’s full architecture: how pride interlocks with other “shadows” cast by the American good life, how these ideologies take on everyday force, and how the argument turns toward moral formation and hope. Even so, as a browser’s shortcut, the Page 99 Test works well here.
If page 99 hooks you, the rest of the book shows why that diagnosis matters. I follow the American good life’s promises—fellowship, freedom, flourishing—and then track what those promises can conceal: exclusion, domination, and a growing intolerance for critical reflection that coddles the mind and dulls our capacity for wisdom. Along the way, I ask questions that refuse easy answers: Who benefits when nostalgia becomes moral authority? What happens when superiority feels like self-knowledge? The text helps us realize that we live in a time of gaslighting—public gaslighting. A time when the obvious is denied. When facts are treated as opinions. When propaganda is called patriotism. When cruelty is called “strength.” When greed is called “freedom.” When lies are called “just asking questions.” In such a world, faith must become more than comfort. Faith must become clarity. Or otherwise, faith becomes synonymous for lying.
Alas, this is not a book that settles for scolding or despair. It presses toward an alternative moral imagination: humility in place of hubris, historically informed self-awareness in place of myth, and character formed for the common good rather than national functionality. Page 99 gives you the thesis in sharp relief; the chapters that follow trace its consequences—and invite readers to imagine a good life that does not have to go bad.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
