IS IT hell outside your church? Those of a fundamentalist mindset have usually claimed that salvation is on offer only for those who remain strictly within the fold. How to Get to Heaven with the Hutterites (BBC2, Thursday of last week) presented an ambivalent version of this phenomenon.

A minister and leader of a Canadian Hutterite community, Zach Waldron, invited the cameras in to make a documentary that would show to the world how they live out the gospel imperative of loving your neighbour. Like the other 500 such communities in North America, they live together in simplicity and peace. Almost everything is held in common, and the community provides everything. They think of themselves as insulated from the world, not isolated from it.

I am sure that Mr Waldron believed that the film would depict an enviable state of communal life; and many of its interviews and images did, indeed, reveal a happy, caring society. But what made this compelling was the way in which another narrative began to take over. Although benign and supportive, it began to appear more and more like a place of control and repression.

The parts played by men and women were strictly defined. No woman has ever been an elder (the group that takes every decision, including whether you can visit the dentist). We began to hear about the runaways; and cracks began to open. Those runaways who do not come back can visit their families only by permission.

We met one young man, a photographer, who was more and more frustrated by being told what equipment he could or could not buy, or what kind of shots he could take. Then, spectacularly, he persuaded the film crew to record his own clandestine departure from the community. This apparent heaven on earth was, for him, stifling: he longed for freedom. The Hutterites' theology is not fierce or denunciatory, but is ultimately intransigent - not like yours or mine, of course.

One of the moments when I realised how far I was from being a good Hutterite was at the depiction of mealtimes. They are held in common, but with men and women, and boys and girls, strictly separated. They are undertaken in dour silence, which, in this family context, felt far worse than the silent meals that we value while on re- treat.

I would have been more at home with the prehistoric inhabitants on Durrington Walls, in Wiltshire, whose 80,000 animal bones reveal it to have the scene of spectacular feasting, neither segregated nor silent. Secrets of the Stonehenge Skeletons (Channel 4, Sunday) showed that the latest research has pushed back the age of the monument by 500 years, and it seems that its first phase was a 3000 BC burial place, a huge circle of 56 pits for the cremated bones of men, women, and children, marked by bluestones brought from Wales.

All this indicates a society capable of organising the most complex engineering and logistical tasks, involving a large population that came together to celebrate the summer and winter solstices. In other words, it is exactly like the way in which Common Worship encourages us to keep Christmas and Corpus Christi.