The BBC's Religious Affairs correspondent Robert Pigott ran a pretty dubious report this week claiming that "most people want religion and the values derived from it to play an important role in British public life".

I say dubious because it's almost entirely based on a highly uncritical interpretation of a methodologically suspect poll (commissioned by the BBC themselves, no less).

Only 1,045 people were sampled, which seems a very small sample on which to then base sweeping conclusions about the British public. More troubling than that, though, is the way the poll goes about getting its answers. The two key statements upon which the poll rests are as follows:

"Our laws should respect and be influenced by UK religious values"
and
"Religion has an important role to play in public life"

People were then asked, for each of these statements, whether they agreed, disagreed, didn't know, or didn't want to take a position.

It takes just a moment's reflection to see that this is a seriously flawed approach. The questions and the scoring model make it impossible to capture anything but the most sweeping generalisations about public attitudes to faith; worse than that, the poll may actually be distorting the truth.

Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with the debate about the role of faith in society understands that there is much more to it than the BBC poll makes out. For a start, the statement "Our laws should respect and be influenced by UK religious values" hopelessly conflates two quite distinct and complex issues. Whether and how UK law respects religion, for example in upholding the right to religious freedom, is quite separate from whether and how UK law should be influenced by it; for example, many religious groups would like to restrict the right to abortion or the right to die with dignity or the right to marry a gay partner. Yet the poll carelessly lumps these things in together. Many people who want the law to respect people's faith would nevertheless have serious concerns about the law being influenced by religious convictions. The poll seems uninterested in capturing this sort of detail.

Similarly, asking people to agree or disagree with the statement "Religion has a role to play in public life" tells us very little. Most people would probably agree, but would have vastly differing views as to what the appropriate extent of such a role should be. How many of those people, for example, think religious leaders should be lawmakers and how many think they should just be public commentators? We don't know, because the poll doesn't care.

Even something as simple as providing a scoring model based on a sliding scale from 'strongly agree' to 'strongly disagree' would have been something! In short, the poll seems completely unconcerned with getting to the truth and entirely focused on generating a desired outcome and a publishable headline.

So, it should be clear to anyone with any interest or knowledge of the topic that the poll is a highly questionable source of information and not something upon which one could base any sound conclusions. Yet Robert Pigott, a BBC Religious Affairs correspondent, reports it as if it is an indisputable vindication of faith groups and a resounding condemnation of secularists. This is, I think, overly generous to faith groups and unnecessarily stingy to secularists.

Moreover, and somewhat bizarrely, throughout the report Pigott seems happy to equate secularism with militant atheism:

Secularists, including an increasingly militant atheist movement, have stepped up their campaign to "free" the public from what they see as the burden of a lingering attachment to religious belief.

There have been advertisements on the sides of buses, and in the last few days, a network of student humanist associations has been inaugurated.

However, the BBC poll indicates that even at a time when baptisms, church weddings and attendance at Sunday services are declining, people are unwilling for secularism to displace religion altogether.

Quite apart from the hilarious anticlimax of a "stepped-up" anti-religious campaign turning out to be nothing more than bus advertising and student groups, the problem here is that secularism does not seek to displace religion from public life altogether, it only seeks to remove it from positions where it can exercise unwarranted power over people, especially those who don't happen to believe. You would think a religious affairs correspondent would know that (in fact if you read his Faith Diary there is a more measured tone and some recognition of the poll's shortcomings). The only people who see a step-up in secularism as a militant threat are politically ambitious faith groups, and that is what is most troubling: this BBC report reads like a press release from the faith lobby.

I wouldn't go so far as to accuse the BBC of intentional bias, but by effectively putting out a push poll on behalf of the faith lobby they've certainly put their professionalism in doubt.

The BBC's Religion and Ethics department say the story is nothing to do with them. I've been trying to get in touch with Robert Pigott since Wednesday afternoon, by phone and email, to give him a chance to comment and/or set me straight. He hasn't got back to me, and no-one in the BBC can seem to find him. If Robert does want to respond when he's back in circulation, however, I will of course publish anything he has to say.

Interestingly, after a complaint from the BHA, the following was inserted into the story:

In response to the poll, the British Humanist Association issued a statement saying that many of society's values had a humanist, as well as a religious basis.

The Association's Director of Education and Public Affairs, Andrew Copson, also raised the wording of the questions:

"If the poll had suggested religious "values" such as no divorce, no sex outside of marriage and no stem cell research, it is inconceivable that many of the respondents would have agreed with the question."

But of course this by the time this change was published, the original story had already been picked up and paraded around.