When the Good Life Goes Bad
The US and Its Seven Deadly Sins
Understanding and redeeming the tainted pursuit of the American Dream
Cloth – $110
978-0-252-04950-7
Paper – $24.95
978-0-252-08915-2
eBook – $14.95
978-0-252-04865-4
Publication Date
Paperback: 02/24/2026
Cloth: 02/24/2026
Cloth: 02/24/2026
About the Book
The Seven Deadly Sins have become the seven markers of success in America. Lust, pride, greed, sloth, envy, gluttony, wrath—these once-condemned principles now guide people’s pursuit of the good life.Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas examines how the Seven Deadly Sins have shaped the moral strivings and sociopolitical condition of American society and culture in the twenty-first century. Drawing on a multidimensional approach, Floyd-Thomas uses race, gender, class, and other lenses to break down the moral crises that define the American Dream. Her critique exposes the harm done by individual and collective practices of sexual objectification, capitalist materialism, wealth inequality, and technological hubris before pivoting to the rise of right-wing populism, white Christian nationalism, and the politics of cruelty. But Floyd-Thomas also proposes an ethic that emphasizes truth-telling, community engagement, and values rooted in humility, justice, and mercy—a new path for the US to overcome systemic oppression and create a more just society.
Evocative and ambitious, When the Good Life Goes Bad takes readers on a wide-ranging journey through US life and culture to explain what corrupted the American dream.
About the Author
Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas is the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University and has served as the 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.Reviews
“With When the Good Life Goes Bad, Stacey Floyd-Thomas has brought the entire country into her classroom and with one stroke of pedagogical genius offers everyone from politicians to everyday citizens a powerful moral vision for living. Floyd-Thomas is the premier womanist ethicist of her generation and with this book a much wider audience will learn what we all know—she is one of the best teachers and Christian ethicists in the world. Here is the book for every classroom, from undergraduates to graduate students, from high schools to churches—let freedom from the seven deadly sins ring!” -Willie James Jennings, author of After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging “Brilliant! Premier ethicist Stacey Floyd-Thomas rejects the moral-high-ground abstractions that legitimize a quest for a good life that is soul crushing. By unraveling the disconnect existing between rhetoric of what we know we should do with what we actually do, she challenges how we normatively pursue the so-called American Dream. In a Eurocentric culture where virtues are no longer required—for vices become the surest means for success—a reintroduction of the seven deadly sins into the discourse becomes crucial, for they provide guideposts leading the reader away from the good life gone bad toward a life striving to incorporate the moral principles by which life can truly be good.” -Miguel De La Torre, author of Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers “Something is very wrong in American culture. In this riveting book, Christian ethicist Stacey Floyd-Thomas offers an extraordinarily insightful analysis of what precisely is wrong, using the framework of the seven deadly sins. I am especially struck by her diagnosis of American politics through the lens of wrath, a politics without principles, a politics merely of angry and abusive power plays. This accessible work is Christian public ethics at its finest, a breakthrough book for our terrible moment.” -David P. Gushee, author of The Moral Teachings of Jesus: Radical Instruction in the Will of GodRelated Titles
