c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) President Bush is pushing not one but two values agendas. The first, creating a morally self-confident electorate, was evident in his successful re-election campaign. The president presented himself as the candidate most committed to traditional families, faith and personal responsibility. He urged us to vote our values proudly.

The second values agenda, creating moral children, played a striking role in the president’s recent State of the Union speech. We have a “great responsibility,” he said, to “pass along the values that sustain a free society.”

At a time when social scientists are observing rampant lying, cheating and aggression among children of both sexes, from every socioeconomic group and from all geographic regions, the president pushed for stronger character education _ especially for urban boys, who are prone, he says, to gang membership, disrespect for women and violence.

The paradoxical character of the president’s two agendas cannot escape notice. The first assumes that typical adults boast high moral standards. The second assumes that typical youth barely have moral standards at all.

The puzzle is how adult voters could be so terribly good that politicians uncritically exhort them to vote their values, if those same voters’ younger siblings, children and grandchildren lack basic integrity and self-control.

Children are born with moral capacity, but without moral know-how. Right and wrong have to be taught and learned. How to cope with moral uncertainty and complexity has to be taught and learned. If we expect the next generation to function as honest laborers and just leaders, we have to help them. And we have to be good enough ourselves to help them.

But is the adult world moral enough to produce moral children? Recent media reports chronicle moral failure in every sector of American society. There have been reports of massive fraud in business and law, doping and cheating in sports, plagiarism and fabrication in journalism, fakery in science, torture in the military and by the police.

Even the religious and ethical leaders who are supposed to provide moral guidance have had trouble doing the right thing. Many commit the very acts of sex abuse, infidelity, theft and gambling they condemn.

For Bush, encouraging a morally self-confident electorate in November was a politically brilliant move, but one that should make us uneasy. It is obvious why politicians pander to the electorate’s moral comfort zones; but it is equally evident that voters need a strong dose of moral humility from time to time.

The high-profile ethics abuses reported in the media are just the tip of an iceberg of moral error and indifference. At one time or another, most everyone falls prey to temptation, breaks the rules of honesty and fair play, and avoids confronting responsibility. At one time or another, most everyone is intolerant and insensitive. And sometimes by our actions we harm people who do not deserve to be harmed. For these reasons, there is danger in encouraging voters to believe that the values they happen to have are necessarily good enough for public policy.

Ultimately the president’s two ethical agendas collapse into one broader agenda: producing moral Americans. How to accomplish this?

We can produce moral adults by encouraging active engagement with religious and philosophical ideals. We can teach ethics in colleges, universities and workplaces, in military and police academies, and in professional schools. Ethics rules for public employees and financial professionals may need to be backed up by legal sanctions to teach the habit of compliance. At a minimum, continuing-education programs on ethics for business leaders and professionals are imperative.

As for children, the United States can begin to produce moral children through serious and sensible approaches to character education _ always remembering that moral adults have the best chance of producing moral children.

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Bush has placed a new spotlight on urban males, but for years he focused broadly on efforts to improve the character of children. Indeed, the Bush White House inherited a federal character education agenda. In the spirit of Ronald Reagan’s re-emphasis on individual responsibility in the 1980s, former Education Secretary William J. Bennett created recognition awards for schools with exemplary character-education programs.

Washington had pinned blue ribbons on more than 250 schools by 1994, when the Department of Education began funneling millions to state character education programs. In 1995, Bill Clinton supported Congress in declaring one week in October “National Character Counts! Week.”

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During Bush’s first term, character-education grants to states and cities rose to historic levels. So that no child would be left unethical, the No Child Left Behind Act broadened the eligibility criteria for millions of federal dollars, opening the door to collaborative local efforts by schools, communities and faith-based organizations.

As a consequence of more than $100 million in federal dollars and millions more in state and local spending, many children today recite pillars of character like the six endorsed by ethics guru Michael Josephson _ trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring and citizenship _ almost as easily as they recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

But character education must be bolder and deeper than most states and localities are attempting. Many programs are limited to anti-bullying campaigns and classroom respect _ avoiding the challenges of teaching frank values perspectives on drug abuse, unsafe sex, materialism and dishonesty.

Perhaps even more important, many programs ignore entirely the deeper, politically sensitive values needed in a world marked by war, terrorism, genocide, starvation, AIDS and environmental degradation. Children need foundations for understanding their complex responsibilities as citizens of the planet’s most powerful nation.

We adults, of course, may lack the very foundations that children need. As a result, all of us have an obligation to be circumspect about our values. Why? We are passing them on to children. Moreover, we are insisting that our values be the basis of restrictive laws that deny others freedoms we readily enjoy.

I heard a man on the radio say that he and his wife voted for a candidate who opposed gay marriage because gay marriage is a sin. We must “love the sinner but hate the sin,” he said.

Is denying consenting adults choices about intimacy consistent with Christian love for sinners? Do we have the moral or legal right to insist that everyone else live precisely as we believe our faith demands that we live? Is “sin” the measure of what conduct ought to be outlawed in a constitutional democracy?

These are difficult questions. Reasonable and caring people can and do disagree. When public policies raise hard questions like these, there is clearly a place for open-mindedness and humility. We have to value our faiths and our traditions, but be open to improving them, too. Moral complacency will not do us, or our children, much good.

PH/JL END ALLEN

(Anita L. Allen wrote this article for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. She is a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “The New Ethics: A Guided Tour of the Twenty-First Century Moral Landscape.”)