1. What a Character
You might not expect many sales of a volume called The Book of Virtues. From the title alone, the book sounds like a quaint Victorian volume, full of stories about good little children wearing knickers and pinafores.
But, surprisingly, William Bennett's Book of Virtues has been on the bestseller list for more than a year, with almost two million copies in print. Why are modern Americans going out in droves to buy a book about virtue, of all things?
The answer is, we're finally realizing that our most intractable social problems stem from moral choices. Things like crime, illegitimacy, and drug abuse are not the result of faulty social structures; nor can they be solved by social engineering. Instead they're the result of moral choices and can be solved only through moral renewal.
But moral renewal is no easy task in the modern world. Our intellectual elites insist that there is no absolute truth in morality-no map to guide us. Ever since the scientific revolution, we've been told that the only real world is the one revealed by science-that statements about goodness and morality are merely private opinions.
No wonder so many people are confused, lost in a moral wilderness. To help them find their way, we must first insist that modern ideas are wrong: There is a moral road map, revealed by God in Scripture.
But merely knowing about the map is not enough. We must also be living demonstrations of where that map leads-the virtuous character it produces. And that takes practice.
In his book Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis says becoming virtuous is like becoming an athlete. Even a bad tennis player might make a good shot now and then by sheer luck. But a truly good player, Lewis writes, is someone who has practiced making good shots for years: "whose eye arid muscles and nerves have been so trained . . . that they can now be relied on."
In the same way, someone who perseveres in doing what is right develops a reliable character. That's virtue: choosing to do good with such consistent discipline that it becomes second nature.
When the children of Israel were poised to enter the Promised Land, Moses said to them, "See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil .... Therefore choose life . . . [by] loving the Lord your God and obeying His voice." Our earthly life is a journey, and every few miles you and I face a fork in the road: a choice between good and evil, between life and death. Becoming virtuous means knowing the right road to take at each fork, and actually taking it.
We live in an age where people are desperately searching for life's road map. Bennett's Book of Virtues has climbed the bestseller lists, the president has proclaimed a National Character Counts Week, and Newsweek ran a cover article on recovering a sense of moral shame.
This is a unique opportunity for Christians, and in the next nine points I'll be talking about how we can take advantage of it-how we can bring people God's road map and show them a way out of the moral wilderness.
2. When Character Counts
The latest trend in education is a bold plunge back to the past: educating for virtue. Last summer two hundred educators met for a White House conference called "Character Building for a Democratic, Civil Society." The message was that public schools should start teaching character and virtue.
But which virtues should we teach? Can a pluralistic society agree on the subject? During one session at the White House conference, a man shouted out, "We don't have a consensus" on moral issues.
Yet, surprisingly, Americans do agree-more than we may realize. Where character education has been tried, local communities have reached a consensus with relative ease. The movement is spearheaded by the Character Counts Coalition, a large group including more than 50 member organizations that have all agreed on six character traits, including respect, responsibility, and trustworthiness.
The fact is that people of every place and historical period have agreed on the basic virtues. As C. S. Lewis says in his book The Abolition of Man, there is an objective moral law recognized by all cultures, simply because we all share the same human nature. Where cultures differ is in their detailed prescriptions for carrying out the moral law.
At the dawn of Western culture, the ancient Greeks and Romans reached a consensus not only on what the virtues are but even on a system for ranking them. Four of the virtues-prudence, justice, courage, and temperance-they ranked as the cardinal virtues, meaning that they are foundational to all the others. For example, courage is a cardinal virtue because doing the right thing-practicing any of the virtues-under pressure takes moral courage.
Christian society adopted the cardinal virtues but taught that they must be sanctified by the biblical virtues of faith, hope, and love. These seven virtues-the four cardinal virtues crowned by the three Christian virtues-became central to all Western teaching on this subject.
Modern people still revere the same virtues, with one crucial difference: We no longer believe that they represent an objective moral law. And so we don't talk about virtues but values. The difference is crucial: A value is simply whatever an individual happens to value. It's nothing but a personal preference.
But virtue refers to an objective order for human nature. In his book Back to Virtue, Peter Kreeft explains the objective view by comparing our souls to our physical bodies. Just as there are laws we must follow for physical health, so too there are laws we must follow for the health of the soul. That's what virtues are: laws for a healthy soul. And healthy souls are a prerequisite for a healthy civilization.
Don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying that being virtuous will save anyone. The only thing that saves us is faith in Christ's substitutionary death on the cross. But once we have come to faith, the virtues are necessary guides to a whole and healthy life.
There is enormous public concern right now over the subject of virtue. But as the White House conference illustrates, most people don't understand it. Why not use this article to equip yourself and your church groups to understand virtue. Then we may begin to teach our society what it really means.
3.True Grit
Mistakes were made," the mayor of Chicago told reporters. He had been asked to comment on city of officials recently convicted on corruption charges, and he resorted to the classic dodge: "Mistakes were made" deflects criticism while assigning personal responsibility to no one.
We live in a bureaucratic age that is sorely lacking in moral courage. Fifty years ago, James Burnham foresaw what he called "the managerial revolution," the emergence of a new class of professional bureaucrats who would dominate all our institutions: government, business, education, and even the church. These mushrooming bureaucracies have submerged individual responsibility and blunted the edge of personal accountability.
No wonder we have so few heroes to look up to today-so few of what Donald Davidson, in his famous poem, celled ' The Tall Men." Every age has its characteristic temptations, and today the very structure of modern institutions works against the cultivation of moral courage.
In his book Back to Virtue, Peter Kreeft defines moral courage as "the willingness to act on your convictions even if it costs you something, such as convenience or social acceptance." Philosopher Josef Pieper describes courage as the "readiness to die . . . in battle" against evil. That may mean dying physically, as when the church is being persecuted. Or it may mean dying internally-dying to ourselves- which is the more common meaning for you and me. To die to our hopes and ambitions in this world, and to live for God, often requires the practice of genuine moral courage.
How do we develop this kind of courage?
The answer, paradoxically, is by facing up to our fears. As Pieper explains, the essence of courage is not that we are never afraid but that we refuse to be controlled by our fears: that we refuse to allow fear to push us into doing wrong or to keep us from doing right.
How do we face danger and overcome fear?
Think of the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz and his quest for courage. The wizard turns out to be a humbug, of course, but he does offer words of wisdom: "There's no living thing that is not afraid when it faces danger," he tells the Cowardly Lion. "True courage is facing danger when you are afraid."
And how do we face danger and overcome fear? By fearing God more than anything else. When James Calvert went out as a missionary to the cannibals of the Fiji Islands, the captain of his ship sought to turn him back.
"You'll lose your life and the lives of those with you if you go among such savages," he cried. Calvert only replied, "We died before we came here." By dying to his own life internally before God, Calvert was prepared to face external dangers courageously.
In today's industrialized mass culture, we are under great pressure to fit in, to conform, to hand over control of our lives to the large bureaucracies that dominate our social institutions. If we want to be men and women of virtue in an age of faceless bureaucracies, we must begin with the courage to face God-to acknowledge Him as the King of the universe and Lord of our lives.
For only when we fear God will we have the power to overcome all our other fears.
4. Temperance for Today
The Progressive Policy Institute has suggested a new way of dealing with teen pregnancy. Or perhaps I should say they've rediscovered an old way.
In a recent report the institute urged the administration to state clearly that it is "morally wrong" for unmarried teens to bear children, that becoming a single mother is "a selfish act," that fathering a child out of wedlock is "dishonorable."
To many of us this may sound like rehashing the obvious; of course having children outside marriage is wrong.
But to say so in a public policy statement represents a startling turnaround. For decades, policy makers have assiduously avoided the moral dimension to behavior.
But today that dimension can no longer be ignored. Political commentators on the left and the right agree that the pathology of the inner city- from poverty to drug abuse to crime-is related to illegitimacy. To use the language of morality, it's related to sexual licentiousness. And the only way to cure that pathology is to restore a sense of moral duty-to cultivate the classic virtues.
Take, for example, the virtue of temperance-or moderation, selfcontrol. The Temperance movement of the nineteenth century rescued ions of Americans from alcoholism But temperance doesn't mean just laying off the bottle; it means controlling all our appetites As C S Lewis explains, temperance refers "to all pleasures "
The good things of life were created by God for our benefit, but too much of a good thin can be bad for us. Food is a gift from God, but we not overindulge. Our homes and possessions are likewise gifts, but we must not live solely to acquire more things. Our sexuality is from God too, but must be enjoyed in the right context, which is marriage.
These are all examples of temperance.
And the social pathologies plaguing the inner city reveal the bitter fruit of intemperance. In the counterculture of the 1960s, Americas cultural elites rejected the traditional virtues of hard work and sexual restraint, in the name of liberation. Through advertising, movies, television, and popular music, these attitudes filtered to the rest of the culture where they often spelled disaster
Upperclass college students might extol dropping out and turning on with drugs but when practiced by ghetto youngsters it often meant addiction and death. Movies and rock music might glorify"recreational"sex but when practiced by ghetto teenagers, it often led to illegitimacy and poverty. In his book The Dream and the Nightmare, Myron Magnet says the pathology of under -class culture is an exaggerated mirror of upperclass culture and its rejection of virtue.
So it's encouraging that policy workers at places like the Progressive Policy Institute are finally acknowledging the role of morality in our social disorders-and we should all engage in discourse on the moral basis of public policy.
But none of us can afford to point the finger. When you and I fail to live virtuous lives, when we fail to encourage virtue in others, then we become responsible for the social breakdown around us.
In the end, public policy rests on private character.
5. Just Grant Justice
A Dutch physician recently admitted to killing a tiny baby girl-at her parents' request. The infant suffered from a brain defect, and the physician says he killed her under Holland's law allowing physicianassisted suicide.
A tragic lesson that what some call the right to die can easily turn into the right to kill.
The idea of rights is the centerpiece of the modern concept of justice. The right to die, the right to choose, the right to health care justice is defined as getting our rights.
Ironically this is the very opposite of the classical concept of justice. The language of rights focuses on the autonomous individual, advancing his own interests. But the classical definition of justice focuses on relationships: Justice is giving people their due-what we owe them.
In the economic sphere this is summed up as "a fair day's wages for a fair day's work." Here justice means giving people what we owe them because they earned it by their labor. In criminal justice, justice means giving people the penalty their actions deserve.
But biblically the principle has a much higher meaning. In Romans 13, the chapter on government, Paul defines justice as "giv[ing] everyone what you owe him"-and he makes it clear that this does not apply only to material things, like paying the taxes we owe to the government. Paul goes on to tell us to give respect where it is due and to give honor where it is due.
In other words, justice is meeting any legitimate claim people have on us: It means a husband giving his wife the love he owes her; it means a wife giving her husband the respect she owes him. In fact, Paul teaches that we all owe one another an unending debt of love as fellow members of the body of Christ.
Clearly, the biblical definition of justice is not about claiming our rights; it's about honoring the claims others have on us.
Ultimately justice means acknowledging the claim God Himself has on us-a claim to our total love and obedience. In this sense justice is equivalent to righteousness, for any sin is a failure to give God what we owe Him. When we sin, we are not simply transgressing an abstract precept; we are failing in our obligation to a Supreme Creator.
Since the 1960s, justice-especially social justice-has become the favorite slogan of political activists. But social justice is impossible unless we first practice justice before God and in our most intimate relationships.
Recall the case in Holland: the tragic killing of a baby girl with a brain disorder. Typically we debate such cases in terms of medical ethics and public policy. But who asked the doctor to kill this tiny baby? Her own parents. When we fail to practice justice in our closest personal relationships, social justice soon crumbles.
The clamor for rights and autonomy has become a canker eating away the bonds that connect us to one another. How ironic that the cry for "justice" has become a breeding ground of injustice.
6. Prudential Politics
When a politician talks about being "prudent," immediately we become wary. In politics, prudence often means following pragmatic considerations at the expense of ethical principles. Its spirit is summed up by the advice given by Harry Truman to an army of officer during World War II: "Generals should never do anything that needs to be explained to a Senate committee."
Ironically the pragmatic meaning of prudence is exactly the opposite of its traditional meaning. Traditionally prudence was not considered contrary to virtue; it was the highest virtue: It meant the wisdom to practice all the virtues in the right time and circumstance.
You see, it's not enough to know God's commands-to be committed to moral principles in the abstract. We must also have the practical wisdom to apply those principles in concrete situations.
Take a common illustration. Parents are commanded to love their children, but every parent knows that love is expressed in different forms, depending on the situation. When a child is hurt or disappointed, love may mean giving comfort and empathy; at other times love may mean giving the child a firm kick in the pants. Prudence means having such a clear grasp of reality that we are able to choose the right form of virtue for the particular situation.
That's why prudence is the primary virtue: It's the virtue that connects universal moral principles with real life in the here and now. It's the virtue that makes all the other virtues effective in transforming our character and changing our lives. Prudence involves the will and forces us to depend on God's enabling grace in our daytoday activities.
Prudence is also what keeps God's commands from being reduced to a mere list of abstract moral principles. Modern people often see morality as a matter of arbitrary rules-generally negative rules: "Thou shalt not" do this or that. Prudence reminds us that the whole point of moral rules is to create in us a certain kind of character.
As C. S. Lewis writes, "We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort"- virtuous people, who are capable of building a virtuous society.
It's a grim sign of our own society's moral confusion that prudence-the primary virtue-has been redefined to mean its exact opposite. For example, in an influential book on foreign policy, Hans Morgenthau defined prudence as weighing "the consequences of alternative political actions" rather than "conformity with moral law." Modern politics has its roots in Machiavelli's The Prince, where prudence is reduced to a technical skill devoid of ethical considerations.
We can hardly expect to build a virtuous society when the individuals who comprise it don't even know what the virtues mean. Why don't you use this booklet to teach your Bible studies and church groups.
We need to understand what it means to build a virtuous character. Only then can we help build a virtuous society.
7. Virtue or Vanity?
A fitness seminar was grimly advertised as "Pain in the Sun"-a week devoted to running, swimming, and biking 24 miles each day. According to an article in New York magazine, for most participants the grueling seminar had "nothing to do with health." What motivated them was a "New Puritanism": an almost religious devotion to work and selfdiscipline.
But whereas the old Puritans endured hardship and deprivation "for the good of their fellow man and the glory of God," the article says, the new Puritans "worship at the temple of the body."
The health cult illustrates the way goodness itself can become a fanatical pursuit-driven by pride.
Politicians and pundits today are calling for a restoration of moral virtue to solve our social problems, yet virtue alone is not enough. As Thomas Merton wrote, "Some of the most virtuous men in the world are also the bitterest and most unhappy," because their virtue becomes a source of pride and competition.
In this article, we have dissected the four cardinal virtues: courage, temperance, justice, and prudence. Yet restoring the classical virtues is not the way to achieve a fully human life or sustain a civilization. After all, the Greeks honored the cardinal virtues, as did the Romans after them. Yet both civilizations perished.
After the sack of Rome, Augustine argued that what the classical world lacked was the Christian virtues-faith, hope, and love-which sanctify the natural virtues.
Consider, for example, the cardinal virtue prudence. Prudence means applying universal principles to reallife situations, so it relies on a keen grasp of reality. But without Christian faith, we see only a limited part of reality. It is faith that pulls the curtain back on the spiritual realm. As Hebrews 11 says, "Faith is the conviction of things not seen."
To the secularist, some Christian principles may seem highly imprudent-such as casting all your cares upon the Lord, or seeking first the kingdom of God. But when by faith we know that the spiritual world is just as real as the physical world, then taking spiritual realities into account is the height of prudence.
Or consider the cardinal virtue courage. It's hard to be courageous without the Christian hope in a life beyond this one, enjoyed with God in heaven. After all, why take any risks if this life is all you have-if death brings nothing but worms and decay?
Finally, all the virtues are sanctified by Christian love. First Corinthians 13 says it eloquently: Though we speak with the tongues of men and angels, though we give our possessions to the poor, without love, our best works are like clanging cymbals-hollow, empty noise.
In a recent speech, President Clinton said we cannot solve our social problems "purely by . . . social action"; we also need to cultivate "moral virtue." But virtue alone will not save us, any more than it saves the New Puritans gritting it out in "Pain in the Sun." Virtue must be sanctified by faith, hope, and love.
And the greatest of these is love.
8. We All Wanna Change
For generations school children have recited that little spelling ditty, 'The principal is your pal." But at a Manhattan grammar school, students recently learned that their principal is not their pal.
School of officials discovered that the principal of Public School 142, Antonio Bilbao, stole more than $11,000, which students had raised through bake sales and school plays. "It is . . . appalling," said school commissioner Edward Stancik, "that the principal would betray the trust of the children . . . for his own personal greed."
More attention and research have been devoted to teaching moral education in our schools than at any other time in history, according to William Kilpatrick in Why Johnny Can't Tell Right From Wrong. Yet these efforts are failing-not only with kids but obviously with teachers and administrators as well.
Why? Because schools are teaching the wrong kind of moral education. Instead of teaching students what constitutes good character, they're inviting children to discover their own values. In fact, the only time this type of curriculum is directive is when it involves trendy liberal causes like environmentalism, where kids are pressured to recycle, or feminism, where girls are told they're so oppressed that they need special holidays like 'Take Your Daughter to Work Day."
But what these educators don't understand is that virtue is not a matter of social causes. It's a matter of the soul, and that's where moral education must begin.
This point was illustrated beautifully in a story told by Christina Hoff Sommers, a philosophy professor at Clark University in Massachusetts. Sommers published an article some time ago urging ethics teachers to focus as much on private virtue as they do on public ethics-to teach things like personal honesty, decency, and responsibility.
One of Sommer's colleagues, an ethics professor, scoffed at her argument. "You're not going to have moral people," the colleague insisted, "until you have moral institutions." And she informed Sommers that in her own classroom, she planned to continue talking about social ethics issues such as women's rights. protecting the rain forest, and the corruption of big business in multinational corporations.
But by the end of the semester, Sommer's colleague was singing a different tune. To her shock, more than half the students in her ethics course cheated on a takehome final exam. With a selfmocking smile, she told Sommers, "I'd like to borrow a copy of that article you wrote on ethics without virtue."
This professor learned the hard way that we can deal with the moral malaise in American life only when we begin to cultivate personal virtue.
It's easy to focus on social causes. As the Beatles sang, "We all want to change the world." But real change starts in our heart and soul-in the cultivation of personal character. Otherwise we end up with students who can glibly wite all the accepted liberal mantras on social causes-and then cheat on tests.
Plato taught that the order in society depends on the order of the soul. In a day when even school principals can't seem to figure out right from wrong, it's time to bring Plato's dictum back to the classroom.
9. Teaching Virtue with Stories
It was the eleventh time Jeffrey Bob Nelson had appeared before the bench in Angelina County, Texas. And Judge Joe Martin decided to throw the book at him. Several books, in fact. The 29-year old used car salesman was convicted of driving without a license-a misdemeanor offense. As part of his punishment, Judge Martin ordered Nelson to spend six months reading classics like Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. "I've tried everything [else]," Judge Martin explained: the idea . . . is to expose him to . . . things that can teach him the virtue of morality."
Well, the judge has stumbled onto the right idea. Reading the great classics of literature can be a good way to learn virtue.
In a new book titled Books that Build Character, authors William Kilpatrick and Gregory and Suzanne Wolfe describe how great stories help build great character. "Through the power of imagination, we become vicarious participants in the story, sharing the hero's choices and challenges," the authors write. We "identify ourselves with our favorite characters, and thus their actions become our actions." In this way, the stories can become a dress rehearsal for our own life choices.
Even adults respond better to stories than to preachy moralizing. Think about the most memorable sermons you've ever heard. Were they abstract moral discourses-or were they fascinating stories about characters you could identify with?
By giving us good characters to admire, stories help educate the moral imagination. Virtue isn't just about knowing how to be good. To change behavior, we need to love the good. As Kilpatrick and the Wolfes explain, "stories can create an emotional attachment to goodness, a desire to do the right thing."
Finally, stories provide a wealth of good examples-the kind often missing from our environment. They "familiarize children with the codes of conduct they need to know," and they flesh out what these codes mean in lifelike situations.
There's a reason that Jesus Himself delivered His most profound teachings in the form of stories-parables about farmers planting seeds, women finding coins, sons who go bad and then repent. These were characters His listeners could identify with.
Legal strictures prevented Judge Martin from requiring Jeffrey Bob Nelson to read the parables of Jesus. But he's made an excellent alternative choice by assigning classic literature. By reading Paradise Lost, Nelson will learn about sin and the Fall. And in Pilgrim's Progress, he'll discover how John Bunyan personalized virtues like Prudence and Forbearance through the colorful use of allegory.
These are stories we should be reading to our own children. As Kilpatrick and the Wolfes write, in times of real-life pressure or temptation, "the half-forgotten memory of a story can rise to our aid."
Clearly that's what Judge Martin had in mind when he sentenced 11time loser Jeffrey Bob Nelson to spend six months in the library, reading classics. If it works, the phrase "book him" just might take on a whole new meaning.
10. Counting the Spoons
A report recently released by the bipartisan Council on Families in America documents what are now familiar-if dismal-facts: Children who grow up with only one parent are more likely to be poor, to have problems in school, to get into trouble with the law.
In fact, 70 percent of longterm prison inmates grew up in fatherless homes. As Bill Bennett comments, "For some boys, the only time they see anything that resembles male authority is when it's too late-in the form of a cop or a judge or a prison." You could even say, Bennett goes on, that "we are asking prisons to do what fathers used to do."
But, of course, no government institution can take the place of fathers and families. Character is forged in the home, through moral habits acquired by practice, day in and day out, from earliest childhood. Virtue begins intellectually, in knowing what is right and wrong-in accepting God's moral standards for our lives. But we become virtuous in character through a process of habituation-by choosing to do the right thing again and again until we become a certain kind of person.
As Edmund Burke wrote, "A man's habits become his virtue."
The word virtue has ancient roots, and to modern Christians it has a quaint, oldfashioned sound. Protestants may be suspicious that virtue is akin to worksrighteousness-trying to please God by our actions. But virtue is not about how to be saved; that happens only by the grace of God. What the virtues tell us is the kind of people God wants us to become after we are saved. God created us for a purpose, to live according to a certain pattern. The virtues tell us the righteous pattern by which God wants us to shape our lives and our souls.
Second Timothy 3:17 urges us to study God's Word to be "thoroughly equipped for every good work" Good works don't earn us divine merit, but they are expressions of the divine image in us. If churches and Christian families fail to cultivate good character, then we will have nothing to offer a society decaying into corruption and crime. And government will continue passing more laws, and tighter regulations, in a neverending attempt to curb destructive behavior.
I'm reminded of a story about the great British writer Samuel Johnson, who was once informed that a certain guest thought all morality was a sham. "Why, sir, if he really believes there is no distinction between virtue and vice," Johnson roared, then "let us count our spoons before he leaves."
Modern society has reduced virtue and vice to oldfashioned notions with no objective basis for the distinction between them. As a result, they have no hold on individual conscience, and the government is reduced to multiplying its bureaucracies to count the spoons.
If we want to help retain a free society, we must rekindle a commitment to the virtues taught in the Bible and honored by all cultures. Use this special "Breakpoint" series on virtue to help educate Christians on this vital topic.
Let's get churches teaching virtue so government can stop counting the spoons.
You might not expect many sales of a volume called The Book of Virtues. From the title alone, the book sounds like a quaint Victorian volume, full of stories about good little children wearing knickers and pinafores.
But, surprisingly, William Bennett's Book of Virtues has been on the bestseller list for more than a year, with almost two million copies in print. Why are modern Americans going out in droves to buy a book about virtue, of all things?
The answer is, we're finally realizing that our most intractable social problems stem from moral choices. Things like crime, illegitimacy, and drug abuse are not the result of faulty social structures; nor can they be solved by social engineering. Instead they're the result of moral choices and can be solved only through moral renewal.
But moral renewal is no easy task in the modern world. Our intellectual elites insist that there is no absolute truth in morality-no map to guide us. Ever since the scientific revolution, we've been told that the only real world is the one revealed by science-that statements about goodness and morality are merely private opinions.
No wonder so many people are confused, lost in a moral wilderness. To help them find their way, we must first insist that modern ideas are wrong: There is a moral road map, revealed by God in Scripture.
But merely knowing about the map is not enough. We must also be living demonstrations of where that map leads-the virtuous character it produces. And that takes practice.
In his book Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis says becoming virtuous is like becoming an athlete. Even a bad tennis player might make a good shot now and then by sheer luck. But a truly good player, Lewis writes, is someone who has practiced making good shots for years: "whose eye arid muscles and nerves have been so trained . . . that they can now be relied on."
In the same way, someone who perseveres in doing what is right develops a reliable character. That's virtue: choosing to do good with such consistent discipline that it becomes second nature.
When the children of Israel were poised to enter the Promised Land, Moses said to them, "See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil .... Therefore choose life . . . [by] loving the Lord your God and obeying His voice." Our earthly life is a journey, and every few miles you and I face a fork in the road: a choice between good and evil, between life and death. Becoming virtuous means knowing the right road to take at each fork, and actually taking it.
We live in an age where people are desperately searching for life's road map. Bennett's Book of Virtues has climbed the bestseller lists, the president has proclaimed a National Character Counts Week, and Newsweek ran a cover article on recovering a sense of moral shame.
This is a unique opportunity for Christians, and in the next nine points I'll be talking about how we can take advantage of it-how we can bring people God's road map and show them a way out of the moral wilderness.
2. When Character Counts
The latest trend in education is a bold plunge back to the past: educating for virtue. Last summer two hundred educators met for a White House conference called "Character Building for a Democratic, Civil Society." The message was that public schools should start teaching character and virtue.
But which virtues should we teach? Can a pluralistic society agree on the subject? During one session at the White House conference, a man shouted out, "We don't have a consensus" on moral issues.
Yet, surprisingly, Americans do agree-more than we may realize. Where character education has been tried, local communities have reached a consensus with relative ease. The movement is spearheaded by the Character Counts Coalition, a large group including more than 50 member organizations that have all agreed on six character traits, including respect, responsibility, and trustworthiness.
The fact is that people of every place and historical period have agreed on the basic virtues. As C. S. Lewis says in his book The Abolition of Man, there is an objective moral law recognized by all cultures, simply because we all share the same human nature. Where cultures differ is in their detailed prescriptions for carrying out the moral law.
At the dawn of Western culture, the ancient Greeks and Romans reached a consensus not only on what the virtues are but even on a system for ranking them. Four of the virtues-prudence, justice, courage, and temperance-they ranked as the cardinal virtues, meaning that they are foundational to all the others. For example, courage is a cardinal virtue because doing the right thing-practicing any of the virtues-under pressure takes moral courage.
Christian society adopted the cardinal virtues but taught that they must be sanctified by the biblical virtues of faith, hope, and love. These seven virtues-the four cardinal virtues crowned by the three Christian virtues-became central to all Western teaching on this subject.
Modern people still revere the same virtues, with one crucial difference: We no longer believe that they represent an objective moral law. And so we don't talk about virtues but values. The difference is crucial: A value is simply whatever an individual happens to value. It's nothing but a personal preference.
But virtue refers to an objective order for human nature. In his book Back to Virtue, Peter Kreeft explains the objective view by comparing our souls to our physical bodies. Just as there are laws we must follow for physical health, so too there are laws we must follow for the health of the soul. That's what virtues are: laws for a healthy soul. And healthy souls are a prerequisite for a healthy civilization.
Don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying that being virtuous will save anyone. The only thing that saves us is faith in Christ's substitutionary death on the cross. But once we have come to faith, the virtues are necessary guides to a whole and healthy life.
There is enormous public concern right now over the subject of virtue. But as the White House conference illustrates, most people don't understand it. Why not use this article to equip yourself and your church groups to understand virtue. Then we may begin to teach our society what it really means.
3.True Grit
Mistakes were made," the mayor of Chicago told reporters. He had been asked to comment on city of officials recently convicted on corruption charges, and he resorted to the classic dodge: "Mistakes were made" deflects criticism while assigning personal responsibility to no one.
We live in a bureaucratic age that is sorely lacking in moral courage. Fifty years ago, James Burnham foresaw what he called "the managerial revolution," the emergence of a new class of professional bureaucrats who would dominate all our institutions: government, business, education, and even the church. These mushrooming bureaucracies have submerged individual responsibility and blunted the edge of personal accountability.
No wonder we have so few heroes to look up to today-so few of what Donald Davidson, in his famous poem, celled ' The Tall Men." Every age has its characteristic temptations, and today the very structure of modern institutions works against the cultivation of moral courage.
In his book Back to Virtue, Peter Kreeft defines moral courage as "the willingness to act on your convictions even if it costs you something, such as convenience or social acceptance." Philosopher Josef Pieper describes courage as the "readiness to die . . . in battle" against evil. That may mean dying physically, as when the church is being persecuted. Or it may mean dying internally-dying to ourselves- which is the more common meaning for you and me. To die to our hopes and ambitions in this world, and to live for God, often requires the practice of genuine moral courage.
How do we develop this kind of courage?
The answer, paradoxically, is by facing up to our fears. As Pieper explains, the essence of courage is not that we are never afraid but that we refuse to be controlled by our fears: that we refuse to allow fear to push us into doing wrong or to keep us from doing right.
How do we face danger and overcome fear?
Think of the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz and his quest for courage. The wizard turns out to be a humbug, of course, but he does offer words of wisdom: "There's no living thing that is not afraid when it faces danger," he tells the Cowardly Lion. "True courage is facing danger when you are afraid."
And how do we face danger and overcome fear? By fearing God more than anything else. When James Calvert went out as a missionary to the cannibals of the Fiji Islands, the captain of his ship sought to turn him back.
"You'll lose your life and the lives of those with you if you go among such savages," he cried. Calvert only replied, "We died before we came here." By dying to his own life internally before God, Calvert was prepared to face external dangers courageously.
In today's industrialized mass culture, we are under great pressure to fit in, to conform, to hand over control of our lives to the large bureaucracies that dominate our social institutions. If we want to be men and women of virtue in an age of faceless bureaucracies, we must begin with the courage to face God-to acknowledge Him as the King of the universe and Lord of our lives.
For only when we fear God will we have the power to overcome all our other fears.
4. Temperance for Today
The Progressive Policy Institute has suggested a new way of dealing with teen pregnancy. Or perhaps I should say they've rediscovered an old way.
In a recent report the institute urged the administration to state clearly that it is "morally wrong" for unmarried teens to bear children, that becoming a single mother is "a selfish act," that fathering a child out of wedlock is "dishonorable."
To many of us this may sound like rehashing the obvious; of course having children outside marriage is wrong.
But to say so in a public policy statement represents a startling turnaround. For decades, policy makers have assiduously avoided the moral dimension to behavior.
But today that dimension can no longer be ignored. Political commentators on the left and the right agree that the pathology of the inner city- from poverty to drug abuse to crime-is related to illegitimacy. To use the language of morality, it's related to sexual licentiousness. And the only way to cure that pathology is to restore a sense of moral duty-to cultivate the classic virtues.
Take, for example, the virtue of temperance-or moderation, selfcontrol. The Temperance movement of the nineteenth century rescued ions of Americans from alcoholism But temperance doesn't mean just laying off the bottle; it means controlling all our appetites As C S Lewis explains, temperance refers "to all pleasures "
The good things of life were created by God for our benefit, but too much of a good thin can be bad for us. Food is a gift from God, but we not overindulge. Our homes and possessions are likewise gifts, but we must not live solely to acquire more things. Our sexuality is from God too, but must be enjoyed in the right context, which is marriage.
These are all examples of temperance.
And the social pathologies plaguing the inner city reveal the bitter fruit of intemperance. In the counterculture of the 1960s, Americas cultural elites rejected the traditional virtues of hard work and sexual restraint, in the name of liberation. Through advertising, movies, television, and popular music, these attitudes filtered to the rest of the culture where they often spelled disaster
Upperclass college students might extol dropping out and turning on with drugs but when practiced by ghetto youngsters it often meant addiction and death. Movies and rock music might glorify"recreational"sex but when practiced by ghetto teenagers, it often led to illegitimacy and poverty. In his book The Dream and the Nightmare, Myron Magnet says the pathology of under -class culture is an exaggerated mirror of upperclass culture and its rejection of virtue.
So it's encouraging that policy workers at places like the Progressive Policy Institute are finally acknowledging the role of morality in our social disorders-and we should all engage in discourse on the moral basis of public policy.
But none of us can afford to point the finger. When you and I fail to live virtuous lives, when we fail to encourage virtue in others, then we become responsible for the social breakdown around us.
In the end, public policy rests on private character.
5. Just Grant Justice
A Dutch physician recently admitted to killing a tiny baby girl-at her parents' request. The infant suffered from a brain defect, and the physician says he killed her under Holland's law allowing physicianassisted suicide.
A tragic lesson that what some call the right to die can easily turn into the right to kill.
The idea of rights is the centerpiece of the modern concept of justice. The right to die, the right to choose, the right to health care justice is defined as getting our rights.
Ironically this is the very opposite of the classical concept of justice. The language of rights focuses on the autonomous individual, advancing his own interests. But the classical definition of justice focuses on relationships: Justice is giving people their due-what we owe them.
In the economic sphere this is summed up as "a fair day's wages for a fair day's work." Here justice means giving people what we owe them because they earned it by their labor. In criminal justice, justice means giving people the penalty their actions deserve.
But biblically the principle has a much higher meaning. In Romans 13, the chapter on government, Paul defines justice as "giv[ing] everyone what you owe him"-and he makes it clear that this does not apply only to material things, like paying the taxes we owe to the government. Paul goes on to tell us to give respect where it is due and to give honor where it is due.
In other words, justice is meeting any legitimate claim people have on us: It means a husband giving his wife the love he owes her; it means a wife giving her husband the respect she owes him. In fact, Paul teaches that we all owe one another an unending debt of love as fellow members of the body of Christ.
Clearly, the biblical definition of justice is not about claiming our rights; it's about honoring the claims others have on us.
Ultimately justice means acknowledging the claim God Himself has on us-a claim to our total love and obedience. In this sense justice is equivalent to righteousness, for any sin is a failure to give God what we owe Him. When we sin, we are not simply transgressing an abstract precept; we are failing in our obligation to a Supreme Creator.
Since the 1960s, justice-especially social justice-has become the favorite slogan of political activists. But social justice is impossible unless we first practice justice before God and in our most intimate relationships.
Recall the case in Holland: the tragic killing of a baby girl with a brain disorder. Typically we debate such cases in terms of medical ethics and public policy. But who asked the doctor to kill this tiny baby? Her own parents. When we fail to practice justice in our closest personal relationships, social justice soon crumbles.
The clamor for rights and autonomy has become a canker eating away the bonds that connect us to one another. How ironic that the cry for "justice" has become a breeding ground of injustice.
6. Prudential Politics
When a politician talks about being "prudent," immediately we become wary. In politics, prudence often means following pragmatic considerations at the expense of ethical principles. Its spirit is summed up by the advice given by Harry Truman to an army of officer during World War II: "Generals should never do anything that needs to be explained to a Senate committee."
Ironically the pragmatic meaning of prudence is exactly the opposite of its traditional meaning. Traditionally prudence was not considered contrary to virtue; it was the highest virtue: It meant the wisdom to practice all the virtues in the right time and circumstance.
You see, it's not enough to know God's commands-to be committed to moral principles in the abstract. We must also have the practical wisdom to apply those principles in concrete situations.
Take a common illustration. Parents are commanded to love their children, but every parent knows that love is expressed in different forms, depending on the situation. When a child is hurt or disappointed, love may mean giving comfort and empathy; at other times love may mean giving the child a firm kick in the pants. Prudence means having such a clear grasp of reality that we are able to choose the right form of virtue for the particular situation.
That's why prudence is the primary virtue: It's the virtue that connects universal moral principles with real life in the here and now. It's the virtue that makes all the other virtues effective in transforming our character and changing our lives. Prudence involves the will and forces us to depend on God's enabling grace in our daytoday activities.
Prudence is also what keeps God's commands from being reduced to a mere list of abstract moral principles. Modern people often see morality as a matter of arbitrary rules-generally negative rules: "Thou shalt not" do this or that. Prudence reminds us that the whole point of moral rules is to create in us a certain kind of character.
As C. S. Lewis writes, "We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort"- virtuous people, who are capable of building a virtuous society.
It's a grim sign of our own society's moral confusion that prudence-the primary virtue-has been redefined to mean its exact opposite. For example, in an influential book on foreign policy, Hans Morgenthau defined prudence as weighing "the consequences of alternative political actions" rather than "conformity with moral law." Modern politics has its roots in Machiavelli's The Prince, where prudence is reduced to a technical skill devoid of ethical considerations.
We can hardly expect to build a virtuous society when the individuals who comprise it don't even know what the virtues mean. Why don't you use this booklet to teach your Bible studies and church groups.
We need to understand what it means to build a virtuous character. Only then can we help build a virtuous society.
7. Virtue or Vanity?
A fitness seminar was grimly advertised as "Pain in the Sun"-a week devoted to running, swimming, and biking 24 miles each day. According to an article in New York magazine, for most participants the grueling seminar had "nothing to do with health." What motivated them was a "New Puritanism": an almost religious devotion to work and selfdiscipline.
But whereas the old Puritans endured hardship and deprivation "for the good of their fellow man and the glory of God," the article says, the new Puritans "worship at the temple of the body."
The health cult illustrates the way goodness itself can become a fanatical pursuit-driven by pride.
Politicians and pundits today are calling for a restoration of moral virtue to solve our social problems, yet virtue alone is not enough. As Thomas Merton wrote, "Some of the most virtuous men in the world are also the bitterest and most unhappy," because their virtue becomes a source of pride and competition.
In this article, we have dissected the four cardinal virtues: courage, temperance, justice, and prudence. Yet restoring the classical virtues is not the way to achieve a fully human life or sustain a civilization. After all, the Greeks honored the cardinal virtues, as did the Romans after them. Yet both civilizations perished.
After the sack of Rome, Augustine argued that what the classical world lacked was the Christian virtues-faith, hope, and love-which sanctify the natural virtues.
Consider, for example, the cardinal virtue prudence. Prudence means applying universal principles to reallife situations, so it relies on a keen grasp of reality. But without Christian faith, we see only a limited part of reality. It is faith that pulls the curtain back on the spiritual realm. As Hebrews 11 says, "Faith is the conviction of things not seen."
To the secularist, some Christian principles may seem highly imprudent-such as casting all your cares upon the Lord, or seeking first the kingdom of God. But when by faith we know that the spiritual world is just as real as the physical world, then taking spiritual realities into account is the height of prudence.
Or consider the cardinal virtue courage. It's hard to be courageous without the Christian hope in a life beyond this one, enjoyed with God in heaven. After all, why take any risks if this life is all you have-if death brings nothing but worms and decay?
Finally, all the virtues are sanctified by Christian love. First Corinthians 13 says it eloquently: Though we speak with the tongues of men and angels, though we give our possessions to the poor, without love, our best works are like clanging cymbals-hollow, empty noise.
In a recent speech, President Clinton said we cannot solve our social problems "purely by . . . social action"; we also need to cultivate "moral virtue." But virtue alone will not save us, any more than it saves the New Puritans gritting it out in "Pain in the Sun." Virtue must be sanctified by faith, hope, and love.
And the greatest of these is love.
8. We All Wanna Change
For generations school children have recited that little spelling ditty, 'The principal is your pal." But at a Manhattan grammar school, students recently learned that their principal is not their pal.
School of officials discovered that the principal of Public School 142, Antonio Bilbao, stole more than $11,000, which students had raised through bake sales and school plays. "It is . . . appalling," said school commissioner Edward Stancik, "that the principal would betray the trust of the children . . . for his own personal greed."
More attention and research have been devoted to teaching moral education in our schools than at any other time in history, according to William Kilpatrick in Why Johnny Can't Tell Right From Wrong. Yet these efforts are failing-not only with kids but obviously with teachers and administrators as well.
Why? Because schools are teaching the wrong kind of moral education. Instead of teaching students what constitutes good character, they're inviting children to discover their own values. In fact, the only time this type of curriculum is directive is when it involves trendy liberal causes like environmentalism, where kids are pressured to recycle, or feminism, where girls are told they're so oppressed that they need special holidays like 'Take Your Daughter to Work Day."
But what these educators don't understand is that virtue is not a matter of social causes. It's a matter of the soul, and that's where moral education must begin.
This point was illustrated beautifully in a story told by Christina Hoff Sommers, a philosophy professor at Clark University in Massachusetts. Sommers published an article some time ago urging ethics teachers to focus as much on private virtue as they do on public ethics-to teach things like personal honesty, decency, and responsibility.
One of Sommer's colleagues, an ethics professor, scoffed at her argument. "You're not going to have moral people," the colleague insisted, "until you have moral institutions." And she informed Sommers that in her own classroom, she planned to continue talking about social ethics issues such as women's rights. protecting the rain forest, and the corruption of big business in multinational corporations.
But by the end of the semester, Sommer's colleague was singing a different tune. To her shock, more than half the students in her ethics course cheated on a takehome final exam. With a selfmocking smile, she told Sommers, "I'd like to borrow a copy of that article you wrote on ethics without virtue."
This professor learned the hard way that we can deal with the moral malaise in American life only when we begin to cultivate personal virtue.
It's easy to focus on social causes. As the Beatles sang, "We all want to change the world." But real change starts in our heart and soul-in the cultivation of personal character. Otherwise we end up with students who can glibly wite all the accepted liberal mantras on social causes-and then cheat on tests.
Plato taught that the order in society depends on the order of the soul. In a day when even school principals can't seem to figure out right from wrong, it's time to bring Plato's dictum back to the classroom.
9. Teaching Virtue with Stories
It was the eleventh time Jeffrey Bob Nelson had appeared before the bench in Angelina County, Texas. And Judge Joe Martin decided to throw the book at him. Several books, in fact. The 29-year old used car salesman was convicted of driving without a license-a misdemeanor offense. As part of his punishment, Judge Martin ordered Nelson to spend six months reading classics like Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. "I've tried everything [else]," Judge Martin explained: the idea . . . is to expose him to . . . things that can teach him the virtue of morality."
Well, the judge has stumbled onto the right idea. Reading the great classics of literature can be a good way to learn virtue.
In a new book titled Books that Build Character, authors William Kilpatrick and Gregory and Suzanne Wolfe describe how great stories help build great character. "Through the power of imagination, we become vicarious participants in the story, sharing the hero's choices and challenges," the authors write. We "identify ourselves with our favorite characters, and thus their actions become our actions." In this way, the stories can become a dress rehearsal for our own life choices.
Even adults respond better to stories than to preachy moralizing. Think about the most memorable sermons you've ever heard. Were they abstract moral discourses-or were they fascinating stories about characters you could identify with?
By giving us good characters to admire, stories help educate the moral imagination. Virtue isn't just about knowing how to be good. To change behavior, we need to love the good. As Kilpatrick and the Wolfes explain, "stories can create an emotional attachment to goodness, a desire to do the right thing."
Finally, stories provide a wealth of good examples-the kind often missing from our environment. They "familiarize children with the codes of conduct they need to know," and they flesh out what these codes mean in lifelike situations.
There's a reason that Jesus Himself delivered His most profound teachings in the form of stories-parables about farmers planting seeds, women finding coins, sons who go bad and then repent. These were characters His listeners could identify with.
Legal strictures prevented Judge Martin from requiring Jeffrey Bob Nelson to read the parables of Jesus. But he's made an excellent alternative choice by assigning classic literature. By reading Paradise Lost, Nelson will learn about sin and the Fall. And in Pilgrim's Progress, he'll discover how John Bunyan personalized virtues like Prudence and Forbearance through the colorful use of allegory.
These are stories we should be reading to our own children. As Kilpatrick and the Wolfes write, in times of real-life pressure or temptation, "the half-forgotten memory of a story can rise to our aid."
Clearly that's what Judge Martin had in mind when he sentenced 11time loser Jeffrey Bob Nelson to spend six months in the library, reading classics. If it works, the phrase "book him" just might take on a whole new meaning.
10. Counting the Spoons
A report recently released by the bipartisan Council on Families in America documents what are now familiar-if dismal-facts: Children who grow up with only one parent are more likely to be poor, to have problems in school, to get into trouble with the law.
In fact, 70 percent of longterm prison inmates grew up in fatherless homes. As Bill Bennett comments, "For some boys, the only time they see anything that resembles male authority is when it's too late-in the form of a cop or a judge or a prison." You could even say, Bennett goes on, that "we are asking prisons to do what fathers used to do."
But, of course, no government institution can take the place of fathers and families. Character is forged in the home, through moral habits acquired by practice, day in and day out, from earliest childhood. Virtue begins intellectually, in knowing what is right and wrong-in accepting God's moral standards for our lives. But we become virtuous in character through a process of habituation-by choosing to do the right thing again and again until we become a certain kind of person.
As Edmund Burke wrote, "A man's habits become his virtue."
The word virtue has ancient roots, and to modern Christians it has a quaint, oldfashioned sound. Protestants may be suspicious that virtue is akin to worksrighteousness-trying to please God by our actions. But virtue is not about how to be saved; that happens only by the grace of God. What the virtues tell us is the kind of people God wants us to become after we are saved. God created us for a purpose, to live according to a certain pattern. The virtues tell us the righteous pattern by which God wants us to shape our lives and our souls.
Second Timothy 3:17 urges us to study God's Word to be "thoroughly equipped for every good work" Good works don't earn us divine merit, but they are expressions of the divine image in us. If churches and Christian families fail to cultivate good character, then we will have nothing to offer a society decaying into corruption and crime. And government will continue passing more laws, and tighter regulations, in a neverending attempt to curb destructive behavior.
I'm reminded of a story about the great British writer Samuel Johnson, who was once informed that a certain guest thought all morality was a sham. "Why, sir, if he really believes there is no distinction between virtue and vice," Johnson roared, then "let us count our spoons before he leaves."
Modern society has reduced virtue and vice to oldfashioned notions with no objective basis for the distinction between them. As a result, they have no hold on individual conscience, and the government is reduced to multiplying its bureaucracies to count the spoons.
If we want to help retain a free society, we must rekindle a commitment to the virtues taught in the Bible and honored by all cultures. Use this special "Breakpoint" series on virtue to help educate Christians on this vital topic.
Let's get churches teaching virtue so government can stop counting the spoons.
This article was originally a 10 part radio series by Chuck Colson. Used with permission.
Copyright (C)1995 by Breakpoint with Chuck Colson.