This political season, there's been a lot of talk about Republican Presidential contender Mitt Romney's Mormon faith -- very little of it by the candidate himself.

Taggart Romney, the eldest of the former Massachusetts governor's five sons and a senior aide on the campaign, last week said he doesn't expect a PBS documentary, "The Mormons," that airs this week will have much of an impact on the Presidential campaign.

"What we've found is as people get to know him and who he is, the question of what church he belongs to fades in the background," Romney said.

But doesn't one's faith informs one's politics?

"I think what's relevant are what his values are, and certainly someone's faith helps shape their values, but the values that he holds near and dear to his heart are not unique to the Mormon faith," Romney replied. "They're shared by many faiths: love of God, love of family, love of country, honesty, hard work.

"Those are the values that are important to him and the values he'd bring into office with him."

Romney is not the only member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to have achieved political prominence.

According to The Associated Press, there are 15 current members of Congress who are LDS church members. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is the first Mormon to hold that office.

Here in New Hampshire, Democrat Katrina Swett of Bow, the wife of former congressman and ambassador Dick Swett, is running for the U.S. Senate seat held by John Sununu. A convert to the LDS Church, she last week declined to discuss her faith for this story.

Swett did say members of her sister's family, also Mormon converts, were interviewed for "The Mormons" documentary, but she doesn't know if they made the final film. Noting the four-hour program is by respected filmmaker Helen Whitney, who previously did a biographical film about Pope John Paul II, Swett said she expects it to be "very interesting."

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was born in the hills of upstate New York in 1830, a place and time period when spiritualism was flourishing.

From this fertile religious ground came the followers of Joseph Smith, who as a teenager claimed visions of God the Father and the Son, visits by angels and divine revelations. In the early decades of their history, church members, who became known as Mormons, were persecuted and nearly extinguished. But today, they claim nearly 13 million believers worldwide.

Taggart Romney said his father is "considering" making a speech akin to John F. Kennedy's 1960 declaration that, as a Roman Catholic, he would not take orders from Rome were he to be elected President. But Romney said, "At this point I don't know that he needs to do that."

Meanwhile, while pundits are fond of grouping people into religious voting blocs -- the purported Jewish vote, Catholic vote or evangelical vote -- it's not at all clear that his fellow Mormons automatically will vote for Mitt Romney.

David Bresnahan of Wakefield, a former journalist and public relations expert, who is an LDS member, dismisses the notion of a uniform Mormon voting bloc. "There's as much of a division between Democrats and Republicans within the Mormons as there are within any group of people," he said.

"So I think that there is as much of a need for a politician to inform a Mormon as a Catholic or a born-again Christian or anybody else," he said. "If you want their vote, you're going to need to get them to vote for you because of what you stand for and the policies you espouse."

And Bresnahan said, "I don't think a Mormon is going to vote for a Mormon just because they're Mormon."

Taggart Romney noted his father's faith was an issue early in his campaign for governor, but by the end of his tenure in that job, no one even discussed it anymore. Likewise, he predicted, in the Presidential campaign, "At the end of the day, people won't decide to vote for him or not vote for him based on his religion."

Bresnahan said Romney's candidacy is bringing the same kind of public spotlight to the LDS church as the 2002 Olympics held in Salt Lake City -- for which Romney served as CEO and president of the organizing committee.

He said most church members view that attention as positive, "because it helps people to ask questions and to want to know about us -- not because they want to become a Mormon but because they want to understand us."

"And that's all Mormons want, is for people to say, 'Yes, we understand.'"

The documentary "The Mormons" airs on Channel 2 tonight and Tuesday at 9 p.m., and on Channel 11 Wednesday and Thursday at 9 p.m. For more information about the church, visit www.mormon.org