Our tagline is that “Integrous provides integrity advice and legal counsel to help faithful leaders lead with faithful integrity”.  You might be thinking “that’s a lot of ‘faithful’s”.  Couldn’t we have just said “integrity”?  Do we just like using the word “faithful” because it sounds faithful?  Isn’t it enough to say that the leader is “faithful”?

The Deficiency of Integrity

The word integrity has a few meanings.  In our experience, when most people hear the word, their minds go to the “honest” and “moral” meaning.  Merriam-Webster describes this meaning as “firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values“, and the Cambridge Dictionary says, “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles that you refuse to change.”

But integrity is far more than being honest, incorruptible or committed or moral.  Again turning to the dictionaries, Merriam Webster says “the quality or state of being complete or undivided“, and Cambridge uses “the quality of being whole and complete.”

We don’t think these can be seen as “either/or” meanings.  True integrity demands “both/and”.  “Complete and undivided” requires an object of alignment–an anchor.  An anchor that only applies in part of your life and can be abandoned in others hardly sounds like true integrity.

These two meanings point to the critical deficiency in the word integrity, by itself, to serve as a plumbline for the leader of an organization who professes a Biblical faith.  It lacks a transcendent anchor.  Rick Warren once described integrity as follows:  “Integrity is uncorrupted motivation. It means you do the right thing, and you do it for the right reason.”  But does the word integrity tell us what’s “right”?

Anchorless Morality

Both dictionaries use the concept of morality as the anchor of integrity.  The Cambridge Dictionary presents an individual meaning of “moral” as well as a communal one, but it is the communal one that matters in leading an organization of humans in the context of various stakeholders such as owners, customers and vendors (emphasis added):

Behaving in ways considered by most people to be correct and honest.

We think it is fair to say that the universe of behavior “most people” in the United States agree is “correct and honest” has been shrinking.  In his book To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, James Hunter considers the ties that bind the world today:

The question of how societies hold together gains new poignancy in a world like ours, where even a minimal consensus of sensibilities, dispositions, and attitudes seems elusive, where there are even fewer beliefs, ideals, commitments, and hopes held deeply in common, where there are few if any real and meaningful traditions observed or binding public rituals practiced. . . . [I]n response to a thinning consensus of substantive beliefs and dispositions in the larger culture, there has been a turn toward politics as a foundation and structure for social solidarity. But politicization provides a framework of expectations and action and very little substantive content. In a diverse society, ideological polarization is a natural expression of the contest to provide that content.

The word “integrity” is deficient as an anchor for leadership and organizational behavior because it relies on “morals” as an anchor, but morals can’t serve as an anchor unless we agree on what they are.  The reality is that, as a society, we do not.  Just think about the issues that were once “considered by most people to be correct and honest” in American society and that have been politicized.

Sadly, our society is moving ever closer to the situation described in Judges 21:25:

Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

In his book Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks observes:

Anomie, it seems to me, aptly describes the state we inhabit today: a world of relativism, nonjudgmentalism, subjectivity, autonomy, individual rights, and self-esteem. The gains of this long process have been many, but the loss, too, has been profound. The revolutionary shift from “We” to “I” means that everything that once consecrated the moral bonds binding us to one another—faith, creed, culture, custom, and convention—no longer does so. The energy now localized in the “I” has been diverted from family, congregation, and community, all of which have now grown weak, leaving us vulnerable and alone.

Anchorless Alignment

At the core of Integriosity^® is the “undivided” aspect of integrity.  Integriosity and business a better way are about alignment.  Alignment is the goal, because alignment brings the fruit.  It is about a faithful leader aligning the purpose, values and culture of an organization in a way that leads the organization and its people to do the right things, in the right ways, for the right reasons, without even thinking.  But “right” needs an anchor.  Alignment needs an anchor.  More than that, we believe the anchor must be transcendent.

Without a transcendent WHY driving the alignment of an organization, the organization’s WHAT and HOW can be misdirected or become unsustainable.  Its goals and parameters are whatever people with power or influence say they are at any moment in time.  We have seen this misdirection and unsustainability happening with the ESG and DEI movements.

In our posts on these topics (post #182–Embrace Biblical DEI and post #183–Embrace Biblical ESG), we noted that the words in those acronyms represent sound Biblical concepts.  Unfortunately, because the definitions being used in the culture were devoid of God or any transcendent anchor, they were manipulated and distorted to fit various personal and political agendas.

Because the “moral” aspect of integrity is no longer tied culturally to transcendent truths and values through a shared worldview, by itself the word integrity can’t provide that transcendent WHY.

The Need for Faithful Integrity

Remember, words have power. That has been the focus of several posts.  Our words become our actions, which become our habits, which become our values, which become our destiny.

The definition of integrity points us to the path for a faithful leader–an anchor for behavior and wholeness–but in today’s world the word alone lacks the power needed to guide a faithful leader on the path toward what we believe is God’s purpose for work and business–toward the bigger WHYs of Humanizing People, Beautifying the World and Glorifying God.

We need more, and we can find it in what Scripture tells us about King David.  In Psalm 86:11, David asked to “unite” his heart (ESV) or give him an “undivided” heart (NIV). Indeed, we learn in Psalm 78:72 that he led with “upright heart” (ESV) or “integrity of heart” (NIV).  David prayed for the “complete and undivided” aspect of integrity.

But anchorless “integrity” alone does not tell us enough to know whether a person is “complete and undivided” in pursuing the Kingdom of God or the kingdom of the world. As we said, in many ways the culture of today and the “way” of the kingdom of the world aligns with the situation described in Judges 21:25, “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”

A person can also have integrity of heart in their wickedness, their pursuit of worldly treasure or pleasure, or simply their pursuit of what they think is “right”. Contrary to the increasingly predominant cultural view that there is no “truth” (other than scientific truth) and each person has the “right” to decide what’s “right”, Deuteronomy 12:8 makes very clear that following “what is right” in your own eyes is not the way of God’s Kingdom.

You shall not do according to all that we are doing here today, everyone doing whatever is right in his own eyes.

David’s prayer in Psalm 86:11 is two-fold—he first prays “teach me your way Lord that I may walk in your truth” and then prays for a united heart.  First, he asks to learn the transcendent WHY and then asks to be undivided in his pursuit of it.  That is “faithful integrity”. It is leading a complete and undivided life in alignment with God’s way—in alignment with Biblical beliefs, principles and priorities.

If a leader has a personal Biblical faith and has made “the choice” to lead faithfully in accordance with God’s Kingdom rather than in accordance with the kingdom of the world, then the goal is aligning the behavior of the organization they lead with the beliefs, principles and priorities of their Biblical faith.

Leading through business a better way requires a faithful leader to live a congruous life of “faithful integrity” in which all they do at work is informed, guided and part of their faith—it is integrity with a faithful purpose.

Core to faithful integrity is having a WHY centered on the Creation Mandate, the concept of Imago Dei (i.e., that every person was created in the image of God), the Golden Rule, the two great commandments (love God and love your neighbor), and God’s model of love as giving and serving generously.  That is the transcendent anchor–the plumbline–absent from the word “integrity”.

Faithful integrity requires building an organizational culture centered on a WHY that aligns with God’s Kingdom in which actions align with the organization’s WHY. It is not striving out of fear, to be accepted, or to receive blessings. It is the alignment of belief and action through transformation.

As described in post #167 (The ‘WHY” Wave), we believe there is a cultural momentum toward finding purpose and meaning in life and work, and it represents an opportunity for faithful leaders to offer their employees a transcendent WHY–the WHY implanted in every human by their creator and the only WHY that will maximize Biblical flourishing.  It is the WHY of glorifying God by Humanizing People and Beautifying the World.

We will finish with a powerful quote from Rabbi Sacks that underscores the importance of faithful leaders boldly adding the word “faithful” to the word “integrity”:

We should challenge the relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong, when every instinct of our mind knows it is not so, and is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge in what we believe we can get away with. A world without values quickly becomes a world without value.

PERSONAL NOTE (from PM):  If I have had a “life word”, it is “integrity”.  I remember a work colleague saying to me years ago, “You are John Gault”.  I had no idea what he meant.  My wife explained the reference from Ann Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and told me I should be flattered (needless to say, I read the book).  Years later, she gave me a large iron sign for my office—the word “Integrity”.  I kept it on my office bookshelves right behind my desk long before my faith was re-ignited. Although the sign itself did not change, for me it came to have an invisible “faithful” in front of it.

ESSENCE: Is the word “integrity” enough to guide a faithful leader on the ancient path to aligning the purpose, values and culture of an organization in a way that leads the organization and its people to do the right things, in the right ways, for the right reasons, without even thinking? There are two key aspects to the meaning of “integrity”–one is acting in alignment with a set of “moral” values and the other is being complete and undivided.  These two meanings point to the critical deficiency in the word “integrity”, by itself, to serve as the necessary plumb line.  It lacks a transcendent anchor, because we, as a society, have been moving ever further from a common understanding of morality and ever closer to the situation described in Judges 21:25: Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.  The Bible makes very clear that people following “what is right” in their own eyes is not the way of God’s Kingdom.  For a faithful leader, “integrity” needs a transcendent anchor–a transcendent WHY.  “Faithful Integrity” represents integrity with an anchor of God’s purpose for work and business–a WHY plumb line centered on the Creation Mandate, Imago Dei, the Golden Rule, the two great commandments (love God and love your neighbor), and God’s model of love as giving and serving generously.

Copyright © 2024 Integrous LLC.  Integriosity is a registered Service Mark of Integrous LLC.

Photo Credit: Original photo By contemplativechristian, “Integrity”, https://www.flickr.com/photos/contemplativechristian/2538196687 [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0](photo cropped and modified to add the word “faithful”)