By Chrislyn Barnes
For years, John Bartkowski attended sacrament meeting with his wife, Nicci, to show support for her faith in the Mormon Church.
For years, Bartkowski, skipped the rest of the Sunday meetings, sitting outside grading papers as a sociology professor at Mississippi State University.
Six years ago, Bartkowski continued to support his wife as she went through the temple for the first time. While he waited for her to return from making that spiritual commitment in her life, he found himself experiencing great opposition in his personal life. He realized there must be more truth to the church than he had previously realized.
Bartkowski chose not to join the church before marrying his wife because he did not want to disappoint his Catholic parents. He said later he realized he needed to find out if the church was true, for his new family?s sake.
?I took the missionary lessons, studied and prayed and was converted five years ago, and the rest is history,? Bartkowski said.
Bartkowski?s conversion has not only been a blessing for his family life, but has been a great help in his recent research study based on teens and religion in the United States.
?As a sociologist I need to be as objective as possible, but just like other professions, what is important to us inspires us to study things that influence us,? Bartkowski said.
The National Study of Youth and Religion began in 2001 and is designed to better understand the religious lives of teens. The study, so far, has been performed through conducting surveys and interviews to teens and their parents throughout the United States.
Bartkowski, along with two other members of this research team, Christian Smith and Steve Vaisey from the University of North Carolina, will discuss the results of their study on teens and religion in a lecture Thursday at 11 a.m. in the Joseph Smith Building Auditorium.
The lecture will focus on the recently published book, ?Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers,? which analyzes their results so far.
John Hoffman, a BYU professor of sociology, hopes the lecture will provide information about religion around the country.
?I hope that through this symposium we can learn a little more about religion of youth in the U.S.,? Hoffman said. ?We see the LDS life here, but we don?t always get exposed to the religious life of others.?
The lecture will be divided among the three guests and will explain how the study found LDS teens to be living the most favorable lifestyle, Hoffman said. Bartkowski will focus his portion of the lecture on these results, and more specifically on the influences he believes are involved with this different lifestyle among LDS teens.
?LDS teens tend to be a lot more devout to their faith than teens of other faiths,? Bartkowski said.
He said the two primary ways LDS teens differ is they understand their faith, and their lifestyles are strongly influenced by their faith. They know what they believe and why they believe it, he said.
The results in the study showed that more than 80 percent of teens in the United States believe in God and two-thirds attend a religious service at least once a month. But the LDS teens were found more likely to hold religious beliefs similar to their parents, attend religious services weekly and hold their faith as an important factor in shaping their life.
Being a part of the church, Bartkowski says, has helped him to better understand how the church?s priority to help the youth is also a big factor in why the LDS teens tend to be different from the rest of the world.
He said the responsibility given to young men to perform priesthood ordinances gives them something to strive to live worthy of, rather than move toward the social norm.
Bartkowski also said a factor that influences the LDS teens is the involvement of adults they have in their lives, other than their own parents.
?The kids know someone really cares about them and wants to help them do something good in their life,? he said. ?This influence creates a different mind set in the LDS youth than youth in other faiths who do not have this.?
In giving the lecture, he said he hopes to remind the members of the church of how much they should appreciate their faith and what it has done for them.
?It is a very unique church. If anyone takes their faith for granted right now, they won?t after this lecture,? Bartkowski said.