Mark Sanford says he has no plans to resign as governor of South Carolina, even though 60% of his state's residents (according to a Survey USA poll) wish he would, and even though he continues to behave like a lovesick youth. This week the governor told the Associated Press that his Argentine mistress was his soulmate. Headlines in South Carolina newspapers question his sanity.

In America, righteous religious moralisers who get caught sinning are as common as weeds. The transgressors inevitably are called hypocrites, and perhaps they are. But I argue that many, like Sanford, were betrayed as much by their moral training as by their own weaknesses.

Too often contemporary moral guidance is reduced to vacuous advice about good and bad choices. To me, good and bad choosing is whether to buy two 12-ounce boxes of corn flakes for $4 or one 24-ounce box for $3.75. Most life choices, however, are too complex to be reduced to a simple yes or no.

American conservative Christians tell us all our moral questions can be answered by a list of rules from the Bronze Age. I've got nothing against the Ten Commandments, mind you, but they offer little help with the ambiguities of today's world. Life today is full of heartbreaking circumstances that leave us with no purely "good" choices – when to take a loved one off life support, terminate a difficult pregnancy, leave a stable but stultifying job, end a loveless marriage. The old "thou shalt not" rules desert us when we are most lost.

It is no coincidence, I think, that the "Bible belt" states famous for their culture of conservative religiosity long have had higher rates of divorce, babies born out of wedlock, and other by-products of human frailty than "liberal" states, where people expect to muddle along with uncertainties and doubts. People who believe they are not supposed to doubt are unprepared to struggle with doubt when it comes.

Further, no list of external rules can guide us through the murky depths within ourselves, so that we see how we are jerked around by our unexamined fears and desires and the deceitfulness of ego. It doesn't help that most "successful" people who become political and religious leaders are aggressive extroverts rather than reflective introverts. Show me a pious public moraliser who is a stranger to himself, and I will show you the subject of a future tabloid scandal story.

The righteously religious insist that theirs is the only path to morality, even though their overall behavioral track record appears no better than that of the non-religious. However, this is not necessarily a failure of religion. Buried within the vast, centuries-old heritages of the world's great religions one can find genuinely insightful moral teaching, if one looks hard enough.

However, any advice that acknowledges the complexity of human life is quickly rejected by the "moral clarity" crowd. It appears "moral clarity" is most often achieved by sweeping messy details under a rug instead of dealing with them honestly. For some, the cognitive dissonance doesn't snap until their sins are exposed on YouTube.

Which brings us back to Mark Sanford. Whether he finishes the remaining 18 months of his term in office remains to be seen. In a public statement issued after the "soulmate" remark, Jenny Sanford said she is leaving a door open to saving their marriage. One hopes there's a door open to personal insight as well.