Cringe-inducing public confessions like those Governor Sanford has been delivering in recent days are a sadly familiar feature of American political life today. A cynical public has grown accustomed to hearing politicians from President Bill Clinton to Senators John Edwards and David Vitter employ religious language about sin and redemption when admitting to adulterous affairs.

The use of God-talk in such confessions is often unseemly, particularly when politicians try to parlay the concept of an all-forgiving God into political cover or assure the public of their contrition even as they continue to lie about the extent of their affairs.

It makes sense that a Christian in public life would invoke his faith when discussing his foibles as well as his triumphs. Yet God’s forgiveness of a repentant sinner does not exempt that sinner from the earthly consequences of his acts –- including the ire of voters who conclude that they can no longer trust a politician who violates a promise as public and consequential as his marriage vows or allows an undisciplined personal life to interfere with his public responsibilities. St. Augustine’s distinction between the City of God and the City of Man is useful here: God may have forgiven you, but that doesn’t mean the voters should keep you in office.

There is a danger in harboring too much cynicism about wayward politicians, of course. In our eagerness to punish any public figure who fails to live up to the ideals he defends publicly, we can wind up squelching important debates on moral and social questions in the public square. A politician who publicly champions traditional values while failing to faithfully live his own marriage vows may be a moral weakling, and he certainly loses a good deal of credibility on those issues when he fails to live his professed values in his private life. But his personal failings do not automatically discredit the causes for which he was fighting or serve as irrefutable proof that he never believed in those causes in the first place.

We should beware of creating a public square in which only those above any sort of moral reproach are free to pronounce on moral questions. No human being perfectly lives his own ideals (unless the standards he sets for himself are pathetically low), and Americans should not be disqualified from speaking their conscience on contentious social and moral issues for fear of being exposed someday as imperfect.

There is a balance to strike here, between holding our public officials to a higher standard and recognizing that a public square populated only by those who perfectly live their professed ideals might be one populated by leaders with no ideals worth defending. 

--Colleen Carroll Campbell is an Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow, author of The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy and host of "Faith & Culture," a TV and radio show that airs on EWTN.