Christians at UC Berkeley.

To say the San Francisco Chronicle isn't always fair to evangelical Christians would be putting it mildly. The SF Bay Area is a region with incredibly low percentages of Christians and churches (parts of the East Bay are an exception, perhaps), so the Chron's weak coverage isn't always because of bias.

Anyway, the newspaper's website SFGate posted a well-written balanced article today about Asian-American evangelical students at UC Berkeley. Here's a snippet:

At Cal -- which now has among the highest Asian American attendance in the nation at 43 percent of undergraduates -- InterVarsity was predominantly white until the late 1980s. Within a couple of years, it became predominantly Asian American and now offers separate fellowships for Filipino, black and Latino members. The "multiethnic" fellowship is the largest, but its roughly 200 members are mostly East Asian, with a handful of white students and members of other races.

Many students attend Christian fellowships affiliated with their local churches instead of joining campus ministries, so it is hard to gauge the overall proportion of evangelical students attending UC Berkeley.

Attendance at weekly fellowships offered by InterVarsity and Campus Crusade for Christ -- large group sessions with singing and speakers and small groups for intimate Bible discussions -- isn't meant to replace going to church. But it enables worship during the week and offers a social network, which is important at large schools, where students seek subgroups to avoid feeling lost.