Beyond Integrity Rhetoric: Reconstructing Anti-Corruption Character Education through Ethical Christian Leadership and Institutional Role Modeling in Indonesia

Abstract

Anti-corruption character education faces a credibility challenge when educational institutions promote moral integrity while their governance practices communicate potentially contradictory ethical expectations. Indonesia's 2024 Education Integrity Assessment, released in 2025, reported a national integrity index of 69.50, with governance scoring 58.68 compared with 78.01 for character formation. These findings highlight institutional governance concerns without establishing misconduct within Christian educational institutions specifically. This study examines how discrepancies between normative commitments and organizational practices may influence informal moral learning and develops a conceptual framework for accountable Christian educational leadership. Employing a non-empirical critical integrative literature review of scholarly publications and institutional documents issued through 2025, the study synthesizes ethical leadership, behavioral integrity, institutional decoupling, hidden curriculum, and Christian normative ethics. The conceptual synthesis identifies three interconnected results. First, normative integrity education and institutional governance represent distinct but interdependent dimensions of educational integrity. Second, recurring and insufficiently corrected institutional inconsistencies may contribute to contradictory moral socialization, although inconsistency alone does not establish deliberate moral hypocrisy. Third, the proposed Institutional Integrity Role-Modeling Framework integrates moral–theological integrity, ethical leadership enactment, transparent governance, procedural justice, integrity-oriented hidden curriculum, and reflexive accountability. The study contributes a mechanism-oriented theoretical explanation connecting moral instruction, leadership conduct, and institutional accountability. The framework remains conceptually proposed rather than empirically validated. Future research should examine its explanatory relationships, measurement validity, and implications for anti-corruption character formation across Christian educational institutions.