Corruption and disintegration (the opposite of integrity) have infected the very fabric of socio-political life. What we have today is a broken, disoriented world.

James Patterson and Peter Kim did an interesting study on ‘What Americans really Believe and Do’. They made the following findings:

‘Americans are making up their own moral codes. Only 13% of us believe in all the Ten Commandments. 40% of us believe in five of the Ten Commandments. We choose which laws of God we believe in. There is absolutely no moral consensus in this country as there was in the 1950s, when all our institutions commanded respect.’

‘Lying has become an integral part of American culture, a trait of the American character.’ The authors estimate that 91% of Americans lie regularly.

‘While we still marry, we have lost faith in the institution of marriage. A third of married men and women confessed to us that they’ve had at least one affair. Thirty per cent aren’t really sure that they still love their spouse.’

Workers around America frankly admit that they spend more than 20% (seven days a week) of their time totally goofing off. That amounts to a four-day week across the nation.

The authors conclude that there is a new set of commandments for America.

• I don’t see the point in observing the Sabbath (70%)
• I will steal from those who won’t really miss it (74%)
• I will lie when it suits me, so long as it doesn’t cause any real damage (64%)
• I will cheat on my spouse; after all, given the chance, he/she will do the same (53%)
• I will procrastinate at work and do absolutely nothing about one full day in every five (50%)
• We say that we are a nation that wants integrity, but apparently a majority of us lack it in our personal lives.

I suspect that these findings are becoming more and more applicable to the Malaysian and Asian contexts as globalisation becomes a reality and Asian countries succumb to Western lifestyles and influences. The difference is only in the degree of seriousness, as the process of modernization erodes traditional cultural values and ethical practices in family, business and politics.

Marriage and family are accorded great importance in the Scriptures as the family is the most basic of all sacred systems.

The family is in a sense a mini church. If the family unit is weak, the church is weak as it is the family of families. Some experts suggest we learn our ethics in the same way we learn our language – by absorbing the inflections and nuances that have surrounded us since we were born.

We learned ethical value, such as fairness and honesty and what’s decent, through the significant adults we lived with and the culture that surrounded us.

Thus values are inculcated, learnt and caught in the family. If good ethical values are modeled by parents in the home, they rub on to the children. Hopefully, they carry over these values learnt into the larger society they interact with.

Unfortunately, the tide of secularism and liberal morality has swept into the Christian family and weakened the moral foundation of the home.

Therefore, it is of fundamental importance that integrity be brought back .

Lewis Smedes in an article, ‘Respect for Covenant’2 suggests that the question of adultery is a question of what sort of people we want to be. He postulates there are two kinds of characters – and both of them live within each of us. The two characters are covenant-keepers and self-maximisers. Culture tells us to be maximisers; the commandment tells us to be covenant-keepers.

A self-maximiser is self-asserting and self-gratifying. A self-maximiser evaluates relationships with others in terms of how much he/she can benefit from it. The self-maximiser’s life is an exciting quest for maximal happiness. Extramarital affairs can offer maximal happiness to a person whose spouse has lost the flame of love and whose marriage has gone flat’.3

Yet, the commandment asks us to become covenant-keepers, people who subordinate the right to maximise their potential for sexual happiness to their responsibility for a covenanted partnership with another human being. The commandment calls us to make a deep decision, not simply about sex, but about the meaning and purpose of human life.4

The commandment calls us to be vow-keepers in defiance of our culture. Our culture urges us not to define our life in terms of past commitments but in terms of present needs and future possibilities. The command calls us to subordinate our needs and accommodate our possibilities to the vow we made as partners in marriage.5