By Helen Whitney

From genesis to completion, the creation of The Mormons did not happen in six days; more like three-and-a-half long years. As Lou Reed sings, “Between thought and expression lies a lifetime.” Or as T. S. Eliot puts it, “Between the idea and the reality . . . falls the shadow.”

Well, The Mormons didn’t take a lifetime, but at moments it did seem to be a lifetime. One filled with a lot of shadow, but also with pain and pleasure, with the sublime and the ridiculous, with beauty and boredom, with horrific anxiety and bursts of confidence. (To be honest, this is true in the making of all documentaries.)

I. Genesis

Why did I choose to examine the Mormons? Since the early 1980s, I have been preoccupied with spiritual themes, both in my life and as a filmmaker. My documentary subjects have been varied, including youth gangs, the McCarthy era, presidential candidates, the mentally ill, and the photographer Richard Avedon. But whatever the subject, I feel a special affinity with the spiritual landscape.

The transformative moment was the six months that I spent in a Trappist monastery in 1981, preparing to shoot a ninety-minute documentary for ABC. It was life-changing, personally and professionally.

I came to know these men intimately. I interviewed all 120 monks before I selected the nineteen who would be in the film. They confided in me their hopes and fears, their certainties and questions, their sexual longings, their mid-life crises, their closeness to God, and, for some, their estrangement from God, even their sense of being abandoned by God. The abbot, Tom Keating, used to joke that I knew more about the inner lives of his monks than he did. I was affectionately called the “Mother Confessor.”

The monks were fiercely honest, flawed as we all are, and yet willing to face their weaknesses-as well as those of their brothers-honestly and compassionately. They represented an amazing cross section of America, ranging from an Andy Warhol dropout, to a farmer, an electrician, a Dartmouth ’60s radical, an MIT scientist, and an advertising executive.

At the monastery, all stereotypes were broken. The monastery was not a refuge. On the contrary, monastic life was tough and demanding, as well as joyous and fun. It was a place where people asked the big existential questions about ultimate meaning: Why are we here? Where did we come from? What is of ultimate value? Why must we die? These were questions I was interested in, and the monks were asking them, not avoiding them as many of us do through immersing ourselves in our busy lives. I came to understand that the monastic life is not exotic and “other”; it parallels the lives of those of us immersed in society. From the early romantic enthusiasms that brought the young monks into the monastery (so similar to the early stages of any new relationship), to the mid-life questionings, and finally, to the late-life confrontation with mortality and death, the monastic journey is the human journey writ large.

The Monastery aired in 1981, and since then, virtually all of my films explore some spiritual idea, even when the subject is not explicitly religious. For example, in my ABC film about mental illness, They Have Souls Too, I looked at the redemptive power of love. In my documentary about juvenile violence, Youth Terror: The View From Behind the Gun, I meditated on the problem of evil. In my American Masters documentary, Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light, I focused on the way that great photographer expressed his spirituality and obsessions through his portraits. He really did write his autobiography on his sitters’ faces. In my Frontline film about presidential candidates, The Choice 96: Dole and Clinton, I examined the shaping influence of religion on their characters. For Clinton, it was his Southern Baptist upbringing; for Dole, Methodism.

And then there were the two more explicitly religious films for Frontline. In Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, I explored the spiritual aftershocks of September 11. In that public yet private moment of vulnerability, people were willing to discuss searching questions about God, evil, and religion itself. In my biography, John Paul II: The Millennial Pope, I created a portrait of a towering figure whose career intersected with almost every important event in the twentieth century. The central animating idea of his life urged faith upon us all. He believed that man was a believing animal and was lost without faith. He raised the question: can man be good without God?

So, why the Mormons? Why did I choose this subject? Because I am fascinated with radical religious commitment. The commitment of the Trappist monks is total. And while the monks and the Mormons are far apart in the way they lead their lives, they share this radical commitment. Mormonism is not a Sunday religion. It is not practiced just at coffee hour and by occasionally helping out in the soup kitchen. It is all-encompassing. It is hard for me to imagine devoting so much time to my church while also producing films and attending to my family and friends. My head aches just thinking about it. And yet, many of the Mormons I have come to know have even more demanding jobs or larger families than I have, and they somehow manage to pull it off.

I knew little about the Mormon religion and its history when I started out. But at the same time, I didn’t have any set stereotypes. I had met a number of Mormons when I was in graduate school in Chicago, so I already knew that Mormons lived outside Utah, that they can be smart and fun, and that they weren’t all polygamists.

These University of Chicago friends suggested that I read Fawn Brodie’s biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History. It was riveting, beautifully written, and not, as so many feel, a debunking biography. Joseph Smith emerges from its pages as one of the most complex, contradictory, and fascinating religious leaders of all time. And his life was so dramatic that if you scripted it for a Hollywood movie, it would be rejected as implausible. In fact, years ago, my co-writer Jane Barnes and I did write a film treatment for such an HBO television movie, and it was rejected for precisely those reasons.

Still, Joseph Smith as a character stayed with me, and I eventually proposed The Mormons to WGBH in Boston, and, to my surprise, they agreed. Almost immediately. They offered me development money to begin preliminary research and to write the script for a ninety-minute film. I can’t believe that I ever thought ninety minutes would suffice!

This is just an excerpt of the full article appearing in the December, 2007 issue of Sunstone Magazine. To read the full piece, you may download it here.

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III. The Research Phase

For me, and this is not true for all documentary producers, the research phase is the most creative (and the most anxiety-producing) part of the entire process. I don’t know where I am going. I may know the general outline of my various subjects-Mormons, juvenile delinquency, 9/11-but at the start, I am clueless as to what the film is really about or how to shape it. Half of the time I’m sure I have made a mistake and want to bail out. The great temptation is to start pulling the reins and prematurely narrow my focus. So I force myself to cast my net widely: To talk to everyone. To read broadly. To accept the terror of being in the dark.

What did I do in this anxiety-producing period during the making of The Mormons? I figured out pretty quickly who were the big thinkers. And with the help of one of them, Jan Shipps (who later became one of my consultants), I started going to conferences such as the Mormon History Association, Western History Association, and the John Whitmer Historical Association. The folks from Community of Christ (formerly RLDS) were a perfect entry point. They welcomed me into their world with graciousness and trust. My conversations with Robert Flanders were memorable, and he became an unofficial consultant. Next, we started talking to the scholars and intellectuals who write for Sunstone and Dialogue. They were extraordinarily generous with their time and archives. One person led to another.

I wanted to talk to the “full Monty” of contemporary Mormons-Latter-day Saints at every place on the continuums of belief and geography. So I set out to meet Mormons in Utah, outside Utah, and outside of the U.S. I wanted to meet people from all professions, and those who were as spiritually and intellectually diverse as possible. I spent time in several wards. I virtually lived with two Mormon families. I walked with missionaries on the sweltering streets of Atlanta and on freezing days in Harlem.

I also started to explore the territory of contemporary polygamy, that of Big Love rather than Warren Jeffs. I was looking for a window into the world of nineteenth-century polygamy, searching for Mormons today who feel they are living the Principle and believe that they are the “true Mormons.” I wanted to understand polygamy in a visceral, lived-out way.

In the world of scholars, I tried to talk to everyone I could, Mormon and non-Mormon, professional and amateur. I sought out the obvious voices, such as Jan Shipps, Bob Flanders, Carmon Hardy, Robert Millet, Will Bagley, Harold Bloom, Jon Butler, Michael Quinn, Martin Marty, Kathleen Flake, Howard LaMar, Mario de Pillis, Ron Walker, Jim Allen, Val Avery, Richard Bushman, and Tom Alexander. People started to send us books and articles. Liz Dulaney from the University of Illinois Press was extraordinarily generous, as was Tom Kimball of Signature Books. I was stunned by the number of amateur Mormon historians. These people have day jobs as doctors, architects, and lawyers but spend their nights researching some corner of Mormon history. By the end of the film, I had hundreds of books in my basement library. By the end of the research period, we had spoken to close to a thousand individuals. Most of these conversations were transcribed and compiled in what the team calls “Helen’s Big Black Books.”

In the early stages of research, I’ll admit to great concern-and “great” would be an understatement. Many of the conversations I had were boring, not illuminating. All too often, historians were unduly attached to a small piece of the picture and were unable to stand back and see it whole. The gulf between the faith-promoting folks and the “let the chips fall where they may” folks was huge.

I was also startled by how little non-Mormon scholars in the comparative religion world knew about Mormonism. With obvious exceptions such as Harold Bloom, Martin Marty, Elaine Pagels, and Jacob Neusner, there were few outside the faith who were capable of making connections between Mormonism and other religions, or who were interested in asking searching questions. Bloom is an interesting case. He is the biggest thinker, and yet he seems extravagant in his appreciation of Joseph Smith and equally extravagant in his condemnation of contemporary Mormonism.

Early on, the dissidents were the most interesting while the faithful frequently expressed themselves in pieties. I was not finding storytellers who could capture the astoundingly dramatic narrative of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mormonism. I was hearing only dry exegesis-factually accurate, but detached and academic. I needed narrative voices that were objective, yes, but urgent and personal as well. People who in their description would begin to answer the foundational questions of viewers: Why should we care? Why in my busy life should I take the time to learn about this strange faith? I heard about people who had recently died who would have been perfect: Hal Schindler, Sterling McMurrin, Eugene England, Dean May, and, of course, Wallace Stegner. I just wasn’t meeting the right living narrators. At this point, I felt like abandoning the film. I already knew that we would need more than ninety minutes to do justice to the subject and that it would involve backbreaking financial efforts to raise enough money to make this happen. Meanwhile, I didn’t have my voices, nor my themes. I, too, was lost in a corner of the smaller picture. I was in the shadow between the idea and the reality.

Then I had several breakthroughs. I found a spectacular family who lived in Denver. Faithful to the core but without piety. They were devout but open to questioning. They were Democrats, had ten kids, and the grandparents were Holocaust survivors. A rich bundle of contradictions. They were also a family whose faith was being tested in front of me as they struggled with the possibility of their daughter’s death from a rare heart/lung disease. They were living out these big bold ideas.

I next found a truly smart, elegant, conservative thinker who was able to articulate expansive ideas about not only his own faith but its connection to other religions. He was able to acknowledge a period of doubt in his own life. He could speak about the shadow side of Mormonism. He was able to do all of this with poetry and precision-and with passion. This was Terryl Givens.

Soon after, I met other devout believers who also spoke with conviction and elegance, and, when necessary, with sound and fury. I am thinking especially of Kathleen Flake.

And then, finally, I met my storyteller, a non-Mormon: Ken Verdoia, the director of documentaries at KUED, Salt Lake City’s PBS affiliate.

I knew then that I had a film.

IV. Making the Film

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The art of the interview. Who is the ideal interview, for me? Who makes it into the film and who hits the cutting room floor? I am looking for someone-whether expert or amateur, insider or outsider-who can communicate with urgency and passion, whose head and heart are equally involved, who uses the pronoun “I” instead of the pompous “we believe,” who is not on automatic pilot and whose language is fresh and uniquely his or hers. I am not looking for someone whose approach to the material is academic, a career move.

I am an active interviewer. I frequently ask people to restate their answers. To compress. To enlarge. To deepen. To provide feeling that is lacking. To provide a topic sentence. And on and on. It’s a thrill when I get a person to talk about the ineffable with poetry and precision, to get them to strip away the generic language of piety, the dread spiritual jargon that can kill a film, to say nothing of a genuine human encounter. Frequently people emerge from their on-camera experience pleased but exhausted.

Of my interviews for The Mormons, who were the big surprises and disappointments? In the surprise category, Betty Stevenson. Betty is a black convert who had lived a tough life on the streets. She was a breath of fresh air. She is a smart woman whose language is juicy, irreverent, soulful-funny. She acknowledged the wildness of the Mormon story in her now famous statement: “The missionaries told me the most preposterous story about gold plates, a white boy, and a dead angel.” By making this preemptive strike, she drew in the skeptics in the non-Mormon audience. I continually hear about her from those who write us.

Marlin Jensen was also a stunning surprise. My experience during twenty-five years of making films has been that the higher you go up the food chain of power-whether in politics, the corporate world, academia, or religion-the more you must abandon hope of getting fresh, unrehearsed answers. People in power are always second-guessing themselves. Their language is stale, willfully opaque, These interviews give new meaning to inauthenticity. Not so with Elder Jensen. His interview is arguably the most remarked upon. As the New York Times review concluded: “You believe him.” Why? I think it’s the freshness of his language. It is unrehearsed; he isn’t pious; he admits the difficulties; he isn’t constantly measuring the effect of his words. The Church would be well advised to make him an even more public face of Mormonism.

The interview with Apostle Boyd K. Packer was my biggest disappointment. I had hoped that one of the most influential voices in the Church would own what he had said and written in the past. I had hoped that he would expand on his writing and lighten and give texture to the monochromatic, dark portrait many people have of him. But he refused, responding only briefly in terse sentences. Even to the softball questions. However, I credit him for agreeing to be interviewed-and it went on for hours. Yes, it was a failure, but I consider it my failure as well.

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V. Reflections on Mormon Perceptions

Mormons have always had a strange hold on the American imagination. What is the source of this fear? Mainstream Americans have kept Mormons at bay with generic portrayals, whether it’s Mormons as licentious polygamists or as pioneer heroes, subversives or super-patriots. Whether benign or dark, most images have been thin and without complexity.

While the dark images recede, some of the fear remains. And its expression today can be startling. For the Slate.com writer, Jacob Weisberg, “Mormonism is Scientology plus 150 years.”

Having spent these past few years deeply immersed in the Mormon universe, I am often asked for my own assessments of Mormonism’s place within the American religious landscape. To what extent are Mormons simply the innocent victims of the universal need to demonize the “other”? To what extent are these fears simply the result of ignorance, so that once the Mormons explain themselves, all shall be well? To what extent do Mormons unintentionally participate in their negative reputation, offer up grist for many mills? I’m not certain, but here are my thoughts.

Fear. According to pollsters, a substantial number of Americans distrust the Mormons and would never vote for one for president. After four years of talking with both Saints and Gentiles about Mormonism, I am surprised by the enduring intensity of the fear many Americans have about Mormons, but I’m only slightly sympathetic with Mormon defensiveness.

When I started out, I was unaware of the intensity of the persecution the Mormons faced in the nineteenth century. I agree that no other American religion has been so persecuted. No other American religion has aroused so much fear and hatred, though the Catholics in the nineteenth century were a close second. None has been the object of so much ridicule, misinformation, and falsehood. And while there is no excuse for the violence, looking at the nineteenth-century context, one can understand some of the fears and misunderstanding Gentiles had. In the film, Terryl Givens and Kathleen Flake talk at length about why the Mormons might have been perceived as politically, economically, and spiritually threatening.

As the Mormons moved into the mainstream in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the mockery was gentler. The new stereotypes are more benign: Mormons now are perceived as industrious, moneymakers, pious, patriotic, slightly boring, and, of course, Republican. Yet secrecy and polygamy still lurk in the background.

Ignorance. It is hard to overestimate the amount of ignorance surrounding Mormons. The Mormons are, as has been said to me at various gatherings, a cult, a theocracy. They still practice polygamy, no matter what they say; they worship Angel Moroni; they worship Joseph Smith; they live exclusively in Utah. And on and on.

At an advance screening of the film at the offices of The New Yorker for that magazine’s devoted and unusually literate readers, a man in the audience asked me in all seriousness whether Mormons were allowed to read books or watch television. And weren’t they all farmers because they lived in Utah? He thought Utah was a rural state devoid of industry.

Secrecy. The old chestnut. It never seems to go away. Why? We live in a time of total transparency. People are shouting their innermost secrets on rooftops, on Oprah, or on the steps of their churches. In politics, transparency is considered the best disinfectant against corruption. But the LDS temple remains a no-fly zone for outsiders. You can chant “sacred but not secret” until the sun goes down, but the temple drives people crazy. Even the fair-minded evangelical theologian Dr. Richard Mouw, who is one of the Mormons’ greatest friends, wonders about the secrecy of the temple.

Slipperiness. Mormons don’t tell us what they believe. I can’t tell you the number of times I have heard this criticism. My experience has been that it is the rare devout Mormon who will own the big, bold ideas of Mormonism when speaking with non-Mormons. When asked about Joseph’s powerful final vision about humans becoming Gods, they usually substitute “godlike” instead. Even LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley, when asked by Larry King about the man/God theology, seemed to disown it. “We don’t know much about these things,” is what he said. And then President Hinckley comes home to Utah and discusses the interview with a large group of Mormons and basically says, of course we know about these beliefs. Don’t listen to what I said on Larry King Live.

Polygamy, I am told by some Mormons, was never really central to Mormon belief. The Beehive House tour guides never even mention Brigham’s fifty-plus wives. Nor is polygamy mentioned in the Joseph Smith exhibition at the Library of Congress that the Church helped create.

Some say that barring blacks from the priesthood was never official doctrine; it was simply a practice. But isn’t this a semantic difference that denies its importance? It was a practice that was accepted as doctrine with profound implications for white and black Mormons.

Mormons aren’t making absolutist claims, so I am told; they are just adding a new scripture, a new fullness. They aren’t claiming the sole truth. And yet, salvation, according to Mormons, is achieved only through Mormon ordinances. That sounds pretty absolutist to many who consider the purposes of LDS temple and missionary work.

I know that Mormons are wounded by not being considered Christian. Many have told me this. Fair enough. But in all honesty, do Mormons truly believe that Christians are truly Christian? Not if you take your theology seriously. There is the sense that you want it both ways. And you are not the only ones. Pope Benedict XVI’s recent statements suggest that he, too, wants it both ways. According to him, other religions, even Christian denominations are “deficient,” and yet at the same time, even he would say that Protestants are in some way undeniably Christian. The Pope has been-appropriately-criticized for his absolutism and his slipperiness.

I am sympathetic to those who tell me that Mormons feel protective of their different beliefs because they are so often ridiculed. In fact, Apostle Dallin Oaks mentioned this to me when I asked him about the Church’s reticence in acknowledging its polygamous past. My response is: Own your beliefs, don’t shave off the rough edges so they fit the mainstream Christian mold. Step into the ring with the rest of us, take your knocks, or the smell of evasiveness and deceit will persist.

Smugness. People who are uneasy about Mormons sometimes say Mormons are smug. They speak about Mormon certainty, which I discussed earlier. They are baffled by the phrase, “I know.” Mormon certainty can seem presumptuous, even arrogant. Of course, “born again” Christians and evangelicals are dogmatic in their certainties. Still, that phrase “I know” especially rankles.

Power. Mormons are powerful. They’re disproportionately overrepresented in Congress, in academia, in the CEO world. The same is true about the Jews, and periodically they get slammed for it. And, yes, the “Jewish lobby” does exist, and it does exert an amazing amount of power. And that is a tribute to the Jews who organize so well in their own self-interest. But along with that disproportionate amount of power comes envy and resentment and a suspicion that the tribe will always come first. Mormons need to develop a thicker skin about that.

Hypocrisy. Mormons do not have a monopoly on leaders or followers with feet of clay. All religions have their share of flawed human beings. But when Mormons proclaim their virtues so loudly, there is danger of being accused of hypocrisy. One example is Mormon belief in the family-in the eternal family. I do believe that Mormons have placed an importance on family that is different in degree and kind than that of other religions. And I have been impressed by that-even envious. But at the same time, and this is an irony frequently commented upon, the Mormon “family” seems to include only those members of the family who fit. For a religion so centered on family, many of its members-whether its gay members or those who have left the faith-have been harshly rejected in the name of family values.

Theology. For Terryl Givens, “it’s the theology.” He thinks it is the shocking literalness of Mormon theology that discomfits people. It is the Mormon belief that God has a body, that the golden plates were real, that when we die we go to a concrete and specific heaven. Mormonism, at least at this point in its history, refuses to take the journey into metaphor that so many other faiths have. Givens believes that the Mormons’ collapse of sacred distance between God and man is the unique Mormon heresy that truly offends-and that it will continue to do so. Most people, he feels, are only comfortable with believing in a God that is ineffable and removed, that creates awe but not intimacy.

Givens’s assessment is right. Mormon theology is going to strike many as unique, and, in some cases, it will be off-putting. But it is also fascinating in its boldness and boundless enthusiasm, not only for the way it takes the American Dream and writes it large-not only can a poor person become president, he or she can also become God-but also for its ability to call people to their best selves, which are selves in community with other unique and potentially divine beings.

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I’m amazed that after four years of immersion in Mormonism, after I have put the film The Mormons to bed, that I haven’t put Mormonism behind me. It’s a part of me and will always be. Just as those Trappist monks I sojourned with twenty-five years ago are still with me.

As I move into the years where questions of mortality press in on me, when friends die too soon, I am increasingly compelled by the Mormons’ largely successful efforts to conquer death, or at least the terror of it. As I have said before, many of my friends come straight off the pages of a Graham Greene novel. They are interesting, fiercely honest, compassionate people who are doubters. Doubt is what defines them. Sometimes they even doubt their doubt. They are loyal friends and great companions on life’s journey. But there are times, like when waiting for the results of a troubling mammography or comforting a dying friend, that I search out different company -and that has included some of my new Mormon friends. There are other times when I feel questioning is overrated and the leap of faith which can’t be willed is truly a gift. And it is in these moments that I wonder whether my flickering faith, this whistling in the dark, is about as good as it gets-and possibly is, in its own way, the real thing.

As I said at the start, I like exploring religious landscapes, and I found the Mormon spiritual landscape to be as intriguing and unforgettable as the physical landscapes of Mormon Country. It turned out to be a rich subject to which to dedicate my creative energies over the last years, and I thank all who have helped me.

I hope that I have done it justice.

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Helen Whitney has worked as a producer, director, and writer for documentaries and feature films since 1978. Her films have received many honors, including an Emmy Award, a Peabody Award, an Oscar nomination, the Humanitas Award, and the prestigious duPont-Columbia Journalism Award.

The Mormons, a four-hour Frontline/American Experience documentary, first aired on 30 April and 1 May 2007.

For the full article, please download the PDF from Sunstone Magazine Issue 148.