Berkeley Center led by Ethnic Studies professor awarded $5 million grant to study the Asian American and Pacific Islander Christian experience

UC Berkeley’s Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI), a unit housed at the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR) under the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI), has been awarded a $5 million grant from the Lilly Endowment’s Christian Storytelling Initiative. This landmark funding is dedicated to diversifying and amplifying the understanding of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Christian experiences.

The award will support a variety of initiatives at UC Berkeley, ranging from research grants and scholarly training to the preservation of historical archives. These initiatives will provide the tools and resources needed to examine an aspect of the Asian American experience that is rarely highlighted in research.

“Among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Christians are the largest religious group. That’s something that is not commonly known, nor is it a dimension of AAPI life that often is studied in academia,” said Ethnic Studies Professor Carolyn Chen, who serves as the executive director of APARRI and co-director of BCSR. “Our goal is to transform and diversify our understanding and knowledge of American Christianity and highlight the experiences of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.” 

One way Berkeley will support these efforts is through the expansion of the annual APARRI conference, which brings more than 120 scholars from across the globe to campus to share their research on AAPI religions. The grant will also support a new media fellows program that trains scholars to share their research with broader audiences, as well as the production of podcasts and documentary shorts on AAPI faith and life.

Additionally, the grant will help to develop an AAPI Christian archive at the Ethnic Studies Library, which will include organizing and preserving existing materials related to AAPI Christianity, while also developing the collection into a formal archive where churches, faith communities and other organizations can deposit their materials for long-term safekeeping.

Alongside the archival work, a portion of the funding will launch a public lecture series titled “Christianity at the Crossroads.” The series will bring leading public scholars to campus to explore how the experiences of Christians of Asian and non-white descent can broaden America’s moral visions of justice and belonging. 

The series comes at an important time for exploring American Christianity, when most of the public attention is focused on white Christian nationalism, Chen said. “But in fact, American Christianity is becoming increasingly non-white.”

“On one hand, you have a side that’s digging in on a white nativist understanding of American Christianity,” she added. “And then on the other side, you have this growing population of folks who have a very different experience of Christianity, race and nation.” 

Ultimately, the funding seeks to amplify voices that have been historically sidelined within the larger narrative of Christianity in America.

“By bringing attention and resources to this field of study, I hope we can affirm the experiences of so many Asian American students and the broader Asian American community we have here at Berkeley, and show that they have a place in the university,” Chen said.