Helen Whitney produced “The Mormons,” a four-hour PBS documentary series about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It aired in 2007 and was a joint production of Frontline and American Experience.

Secrecy, the old chestnut. And Noah [Feldman] has spoken in considerable detail about secrecy, about how it was born out of persecution as a response to violent persecution in the 19th century and soft bigotry in the 20th and 21st.

So everything I was going to say about that—I certainly don’t have to—and I won’t go there. But instead, I’d like to focus just a little bit on my own experience of Mormon secrecy in the making of the film and of other people’s experience as they relate it to me.

You know, we do live in this time of total transparency, and people are just shouting their innermost secrets on rooftops on Oprah. And in politics, transparency is considered the best disinfectant of corruption.

And Noah’s right about this in terms of the temple as a focal point. It remains a no fly [zone] for outsiders. The Mormons can chant sacred but not secret till the sun goes down, but the temple drives people crazy.

Even the fair-minded evangelical theologian who was on the film, who’s a real friend of the Mormons, Dr. Richard Mouw—and he’s one of, you know, Mormon’s greatest friends—wondered with me about the secrecy of the temple.

A well-known scholar, whose name will not be mentioned, sympathetic to the 19th century Mormons, not to the 20th, made an offhand comment to me that he still didn’t trust the modern Mormons, even as they were moving into the mainstream. That move, he felt, was a facade. They were, and these were his words, potentially dangerous, radioactive, and could ignite, though not in his lifetime.

This is a kind of darker sort of version of the imagery of the kindling that I heard earlier, earlier on. The question I constantly hear in the making of the film and people responding to the film: Do Mormons tell us what they really believe?

And again, Noah has quite elegantly and precisely described the roots of that reluctance. But nonetheless, I just, I can’t tell you the times that I hear this. And in truth, in my own experience, talking to so many Mormons, both the ordinary folk and right up to the general authorities: It’s the rare experience for me that I’m with a Mormon who will own, if he or she knows, the big, bold ideas of Mormonism.

When speaking with them, this is frequently what I hear when I try to engage them about their faith. When asked about Joseph’s powerful, final vision about becoming man becoming God, godlike is almost always substitute for becoming a god.

Even President Hinkley, when he was on a Larry King Show, was asked about the man-god theology. He seemed to disown it. We don’t know much about these things, he said. And then when he went home to Utah and discussed the interview with a large group of Mormons, he basically said, of course we do know about those beliefs. But I’d just rather not talk about them.

Polygamy. I’m told by some Mormons that polygamy was never really central to Mormon belief. And this is astonishing because polygamy was a core belief in the 19th century church. It was essential to salvation as important, as Kathleen says in the film, as baptism was for the ordinary Christian.

However, the Beehive House tours never even, you know, not one mention of Brigham Young’s 50-odd wives. He only had one, and nor was polygamy ever mentioned in the Joseph Smith exhibition at the Library of Congress that the church helped create.

Some may even have said to me that barring blacks from the priesthood was never official doctrine. It was just a practice. But isn’t this a semantic difference denying its importance? It was a practice that was accepted until 40-odd years ago as a doctrine of profound implications for white and black Mormons.

I’m often told that Mormons aren’t making absolutist claims. We’re just adding a new scripture, a new fullness. We aren’t claiming this old truth. And yet salvation according to Mormons is only achieved through Mormon ordinances.

I know that some Mormons are wounded by not being considered Christian, although a number of Mormons acknowledge with pride that they’re not traditional Christians, and I understand that I can absolutely understand when they’re infuriated. But also in all honesty, do Mormons truly believe that Christians are sufficiently Christian? Not if they take their theology seriously, and there is a sense, I feel, that they do want it both ways.

And they’re not the only one. The Pope’s recent statements suggest that he too wants it both ways. Other religions, he says, other Christian denominations are deficient, that’s his quote, according to him. And at the same time, even he would say Protestants are in some way undeniably Christian. Pope Benedict has been appropriately criticized for his absolutism and his slipperiness.

I’m sympathetic, enormously sympathetic, to those who tell me that Mormons feel protective of their different beliefs because they’re so often either ridiculed or, if they were lived in the 19th century, they’d be killed for them occasionally.

And in fact, I spent some time with Apostle Dallin Oaks talking about this, particularly when I asked him about the Church’s reticence in acknowledging its polygamous past. And that pretty much was what he said, and he said, I think I got a sense from him that the Church was going to be a lot more forward in acknowledging, certainly that part of their past.

And, you know, I, in our long conversation together about this, I just said, you know, my own advice is: own those beliefs. Don’t shave off the rough edges so they fit the mainstream. Otherwise, you know, the criticism will still be out there however understandable and, you know, the smell of evasiveness will linger.