Huge Rise in Evangelical Asian Americans

Young, Asian American, and Christian

Berkeley's always been a strange place. I know many Asians either were forced to go there or avoid it like the plague. No surprise that they're still nuts.

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"Asian-American evangelical Christians have become commonplace at elite universities across the US. The trend started in the late '80s and early '90s, and increased as the presence of Asian Americans on campuses grew — specifically East Asians of Chinese and Korean descent. By the 2000s, it had become a phenomenon meriting research papers, books, and articles.

Although Asian Americans only make up about 4 percent of the US population, they constitute about 15 percent of the students at Ivy League colleges, and more than 40 percent at schools like UCLA, UC Irvine, and UC Berkeley, according to a 2007 article, "Asian Americans for Jesus: Changing the Face of Campus Evangelicalism" by Rebecca Kim, an assistant professor of sociology at Pepperdine University. And yet their numbers are disproportionately higher in campus fellowships, sometimes as much as 80 percent."