NEWS FEATURE: Author says `integrity’ key to good citizenship

c. 1996 Religion News Service WASHINGTON (RNS)-Stephen Carter is looking for a presidential candidate who will give the same speech to the business-oriented U.S. Chamber of Commerce and labor advocate AFL-CIO. That, says the Yale University law professor and intellectual provocateur, would be a sign of integrity. Integrity is what’s missing from the current political […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON (RNS)-Stephen Carter is looking for a presidential candidate who will give the same speech to the business-oriented U.S. Chamber of Commerce and labor advocate AFL-CIO.

That, says the Yale University law professor and intellectual provocateur, would be a sign of integrity.


Integrity is what’s missing from the current political scene, as well as from much of America’s public and private lives, according to Carter, whose best-selling book on religion and public policy,”The Culture of Disbelief,”drew praise in religious and political circles.

In short, Carter says,”American politics is a mess.” To prove his point, Carter has written a new book,”Integrity”(Basic Books, $24), arguing that the classic virtue of his title is”the crucial element of good citizenship.”It’s more important for me to know whether someone has integrity than it is to know whether I agree or disagree with him on a variety of issues,”he said in an interview.

Integrity for Carter is more than just being honest. It is also a willingness to make sacrifices for the sake of right.

The new book covers much of the same ground that Carter, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale, explored in his past books challenging liberal principles and questioning conservative pieties.

Carter broke onto the national scene in 1991 with his book,”Reflections of an Affirmation Action Baby,”a controversial and critical look at programs for African-Americans aimed at ending discrimination. While candidly saying in the book that he got into law school”because I am black,”he argued that affirmative action programs have”done nothing at all for the true victims of racism”-the poor and working-class blacks.

Carter followed that in 1993 with”The Culture of Disbelief,”a best-selling but equally controversial book in which he argued American culture-especially the media and legal establishments-trivializes and scorns religious beliefs and acts to keep those beliefs out of the public arena.

The book won plaudits from President Clinton and a host of other luminaries and made Carter a star of the”religion and politics”circuit.”Integrity,”timed in part to coincide with the current presidential campaign, offers more of the same but with heightened, although not exclusive, attention to the political world. In addition to politics, his targets include the education system, the news media, the law and lawyers, the state of marriage, and the way sports operate in American life.


Grade inflation at colleges and universities, cheating in professional football, the”emotional pornography”practiced by the media during the O.J. Simpson trial-all are signs of a land barren of and hungry for integrity, in Carter’s view.”I wrote this book because of my children and the difficulty of trying to raise children with good social values in a nation that talks about values, and believes in values, but often can’t live up to its own aspirations,”Carter said in Washington during a 10-city promotional tour.

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Sitting in the lobby of a downtown hotel as he waited for a car to take him to a bookstore for an evening reading and book-signing, Carter spoke with the ease of one practiced at giving interviews. He marshaled his argument like the lawyer and professor that he is, delivering them with precision and an easy ability to turn each question back to the theme of his book.

Americans, he said, long for integrity among their leaders even as they hope to find it in themselves.”One of the reasons we’re so enamored of it (integrity) and one of the reasons we celebrate people who have a lot of it-the Mother Teresas of the world, the Martin Luther Kings-is that we recognize, or want to believe, that there is a person of integrity in each of us struggling to get out,”Carter said.”Each of us wants to believe that he or she has the capacity to sacrifice deeply for what we think is right.” Integrity is not, however, an easy virtue to cultivate, he said.

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Carter defines integrity as first discerning what is right and what is wrong and knowing that”some beliefs, some acts, are morally better than others.” A person of integrity must then be willing to act on those beliefs”even at personal cost”and, finally, be willing to say”openly that you are acting on your understanding of right from wrong,”Carter said.

For the baby-boom generation-of which Carter, 42, is a member- developing those traits, especially the ability of discernment in a culture that values relativism, is especially hard, he said.”There is a lot of moral anxiety among baby boomers,”he said.”I think that a lot of the baby boomers have a sense of moral rudderlessness that we’re striving to overcome.” Carter said that”moral rudderlessness”stems from the fact that baby boomers, who came of age during the Vietnam era,”as a generation, (have) never fought a war for something they believed in. We’re not accustomed to the idea of sacrifice,”he said. Couple that with a”relentlessly materialistic vision of life”that has evolved over the past two decades, and”you’re left with a spiritual void,”he said.

Carter believes spiritual searching among baby boomers will create a demand for”a political life of greater integrity.” In the final analysis, he said, a life of integrity is akin to the religious life.”It seems to me that (integrity) is what the religiously lived life is. It’s a life in which you try to judge the right thing to do by God’s will. And the hard thing about the religious life is then trying to carry out that understanding … (and) do it even when it is difficult.”The discernment part (of integrity) is very hard for us,”he said.”We don’t like to face things that are painful. We don’t like to face the possibility that at times things we cherish are wrong, or that things that bother us, (things) that we’d rather not do, are the right thing to do.”


MJP END ANDERSON

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