There are proven methods to weaken the influence of faith in public life. One is to use the power of the state to restrict religious activity or marginalize its values. Another is to simply ignore the civic contribution of religion, to act as if it doesn't exist. In other words, maintain either a posture of attack or one of indifference. Both approaches were on display this past week in the BBC's coverage of two national issues: prison overcrowding and gay rights.

Last week Home Secretary John Reid was raked over the coals for allegedly telling judges to give criminals lighter sentences in order to ease overcrowding. The prison population in England and Wales stands at nearly 78,000 -- an 85 percent spike since 1993. That includes a 26 percent jump in the number of children and young people incarcerated. As one expert told BBC Two's Newsnight: "We're standing on the brink of a prisons' crisis."

That may well be the case, especially if we consider the likely outcome of swarms of young people caught in a prison maze of drugs and violence. What struck me is that hardly anyone in government -- or in the BBC's editorial shop -- seems to have a clue about how to step back from the ledge. Most prisoners, after all, will eventually be released back into the community. But Britain, like the United States, will watch most of them return to prison unless government seriously engages with community and faith-based groups that work effectively with inmates and ex-offenders.

In the news coverage I heard, there was almost no discussion about the problem of repeat offenders, or the profound challenges faced by ex-inmates returning to life on the outside: Most are estranged from their families, can't hold down a steady job, lack basic literacy skills, and will struggle with drugs or alcohol. What do we expect will happen once they're back on the streets?

Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative Party leader, has been a trailblazer in promoting the redemptive work of community and faith-based groups. His Centre for Social Justice is one of the most important sources of sound policy and best practices. It would be a useful thing if more politicians from all the parties, along with editors from the BBC, spent time with religious organizations such as Prison Fellowship, the largest faith-based prison ministry in the world. I've traveled into maximum security prisons with the group's founder, Charles Colson, and seen their transformative work up close. It beats the Nanny State hands down.

"We will only tackle the deepest manifestations of poverty and alienation," writes Iain Duncan Smith, "when we rebuild the people-sized institutions of free society." Religious organizations are crucial players in this project of rebuilding. A trip or two into prison with these "people-sized institutions" could help cure the spiritual tone-deafness that seems to afflict politicians and media types alike.

So much for benign neglect. We also saw the posture of attack: The Blair government has formally denied the right of Catholic adoption agencies to insist that children under their care be placed with married, heterosexual couples. After a few moments of public hand-wringing, Downing Street decided there would be no exemption from the so-called "Equality Bill," which bans discrimination against gays. After a few moments of agonized silence, Conservative Party leader David Cameron backed the government against the Catholic Church.

Let's be clear what this row is about, since BBC coverage of it quite often was opaque: This is about government using its coercive power to trample the inalienable rights -- yes, Jefferson's formulation is apt here -- of religious believers in a free society. It is not about protecting the desire of gays to adopt children; they have that right under British law regardless of the policies of religious adoption agencies. This is about the state imposing a contentious vision of human sexuality on every institution of civil society, secular and religious.

Journalists love church-state controversy and the BBC loved this story. Sadly, their coverage focused mostly on the superficial contest -- who won, who lost -- rather than on the bedrock issues at stake. So, for example, BBC political editor Nick Robinson admitted that a "clash of principles" was at work, but unreservedly failed to grasp what those principles were. "The government either has a ban on anti-gay discrimination or it does not," he wrote. It apparently did not occur to Mr. Robinson that religious entities might have any fundamental rights worth preserving.

Similarly, when BBC Two's Newsnight addressed the government's handling of the matter, it ignored the massive implications of the state's verdict. Host Jeremy Paxman, speaking with the dry dispatch of a funeral director, noted that the Catholic Church had been given two years to get in line with the law: "It is a compromise which is a defeat for the church." That's like saying the Battle of Waterloo was a defeat for Napoleon. It was that, and so much more. Blair's political edict is a repudiation of the cardinal principles of liberal democracy: freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of association.

We take our First Amendment rights seriously in the United States. But here media and political elites seemed only too happy to dispense with them. Church leaders didn’t perform much better. Words from John Locke, the Brit to whom America's Founders owe an enduring debt, are worth recalling: "Whether the magistrate join himself to any church, or separate from it, the church remains always as it was before, a free and voluntary society," he wrote in his Letter on Toleration. "It neither acquires the power of the sword by the magistrate's coming to it, nor does it lose the right of instruction and excommunication by his going from it. This is the fundamental and immutable right of a spontaneous society…"

Up until a few days ago, this "right of instruction" was indeed a fundamental and immutable right for Britons of all faiths or of no faith. Today that right exists in name only, which is to say it is headed for the ash heap of history.

-- Joseph Loconte is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a commentator on religion for National Public Radio.