In a Josephson Institute survey, students at religious schools proved more likely to cheat and lie to parents and teachers than the national average. Meanwhile, the list keeps growing of top achievers who got snared in their own web of lies. Martha Stewart has just been sentenced for lying to investigators; 28 top federal employees hold fake degrees; journalists at USA Today, The New York Times and The Nation have presented fiction as fact.

Seen most charitably, the ever-rising toll of lies told to get ahead might in part reflect a rising level of scrutiny and standards for leaders, according to Douglas Porpora, author of "Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in America." Although lying has always been around, he says, today's reporters who probe routinely into private lives are now more likely to find and expose it.

"In some senses, the bar has been raised in how the news covers it," says Porpora, who chairs the department of culture and communications at Drexel University in Philadelphia. "John F. Kennedy was having affairs left and right. That's dishonest, but we didn't care and the press left it alone."

Yet what's also noteworthy today, Porpora adds, is that the ordinary person is willing to tolerate routine lying under certain circumstances. When the crime seems practically harmless — to cheat the government out of a few tax dollars, or to bill a rich client for a few unworked hours — then the working guy seems to have won, according to Porpora and other analysts. And when the culprit seems repentant, Swanson says, punishments sometimes amount to a slap on the wrist.

Solutions to the lying epidemic, cultural analysts say, might involve dual approaches: lessening pressures to cheat and heightening resistance in individuals. Callahan emphasizes the need to fix incentive systems that he says have produced "too much competitiveness, too much insecurity" and "a gap between winners and losers that is too big." Josephson, meanwhile, suggests educating the next generation, who may be enticed by the potential payoffs for liars, about the hefty costs of deception and shame.

"The cost on the other side is too great. It's disgrace," Josephson says. He offers the example of Richard Scrushy, former CEO of HealthSouth Corp., whose indictment on 85 counts of fraud led a graffiti artist to scrawl "thief" across his statue in Birmingham, Ala. "We need to ask what our children will think of us when they say, 'Dad, you did what?' "

Given their mission to improve human character, religious institutions might be best positioned to restore the virtue of honesty, but they, too, face an uphill climb. According to the Rev. Jack Good, the church's own truth-telling crisis runs deeper than the sexual abuse scandal that engulfed the Roman Catholic Church and forced bishops to explain why they kept quiet about known predatory priests.

"People who come to church on Sunday don't see a people willing to confront conflict or tough issues or what biblical scholarship says about the Bible," says Good, a retired pastor in the United Church of Christ and author of "The Dishonest Church."

"The church is setting a bad example 'on truth-telling,' and I think a case can be made that it reverberates through all of society."

Great progress could occur if Americans could reclaim the definitions of success as laid out in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, according to American University Islamic studies chairman Akbar Ahmed. The trouble is, he says, too many profess to abide by an ancient faith but in actuality their passion is for social status and material gain.

"Those assumptions of life as a quest for moral improvement cannot exist with a philosophy that you need to get to the top of the totem pole at all costs," Ahmed says. "You cannot have both."