As prayers focus on the persecuted church this Sunday (November 2) for the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church (IDOP), there is a growing backlash against claims that Christians are being subjected to genocide while Christians are being murdered every day in Nigeria.
The pushback from Nigerian government officials, lobbyists and policymakers comes as efforts to hold the Nigerian government accountable increase. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz introduced the Nigeria Religious Freedom and Accountability Act, which calls for U.S. action against Nigeria’s legal framework that enables religious persecution. Representative Marlin Stutzman of Indiana has proposed a companion bill in the House that aims to do the same.
Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and 34 other human rights and government leaders sent a petition to President Trump on October 15, condemning the Nigerian government’s treatment of religious minorities and calling on the administration to redesignate Nigeria as a “country of special concern,” as it did during his first term.
On Friday (October 31), President Trump claimed on Truth Social that “this will make Nigeria a CPC.” The post is understood to be a pledge by the US State Department to include Nigeria when it designates the country as part of the Chinese Communist Party later this year.
“The Nigerian government is directly violating religious freedom by enforcing Islamic blasphemy laws that carry the death penalty and harsh prison terms for citizens of various religions, and it is clearly condoning the unique and relentless attacks on Christian farmers by extremist Fulani Muslim herders who appear to be seeking to forcibly Islamize the Middle Belt,” the petition to Trump said.
The petition succinctly summarizes a flurry of information about Islamic extremist violence in Nigeria, which has killed 52,000 Christians and attacked more than 20,000 church buildings since 2009, according to figures from the International Association for Civil Rights and the Rule of Law. The petition acknowledges that Boko Haram and other Islamic State and al-Qaeda-linked terrorist groups seeking religious and political control in the country attack Muslims and Christians alike, but says Fulani Muslim herders pose the greatest danger to Christians.
“The greatest threat facing Christians in Nigeria is from the Fulani Muslim herders, who brandish AK-47s and invade peaceful Christian farming areas in central Nigeria, chanting “Allahu Akbar.” “They are slaughtering families, burning homes and crops, and displacing millions of Christians from their ancestral lands,” the petition said, including former Congressman Frank Wolf and the United States Commission on International Affairs, who signed it in their personal capacities. Maureen Ferguson, member of Religious Freedom; “Many local churches and civilian observers view this pattern of Fulani attacks as a systematic effort to seize land and forcibly Islamize the area.”
In stark contrast to the government’s fight against the northern Islamic extremist terrorist group, authorities are allowing Fulani herdsmen to attack defenseless Middle Belt Christians with “total impunity,” the petition says.
“We have not been able to investigate the Fulani organizational structure and identify who is arming the Fulani,” the petition said. “Authorities have not enforced the country’s gun laws against Fulani people. They have not taken action to reclaim stolen farms for their Christian owners and are instead forced to live in extreme poverty in internally displaced persons camps with little government assistance. The government rarely arrests Fulani people who attack Christians and never convicts them. When warned of impending attacks on Fulani people, government security forces are usually unresponsive or powerless.”
Following the revocation of Nigeria’s CPC designation by the first Trump administration in 2021, the U.S. State Department’s 2023 Religious Freedom Report lays out a neo-Marxist theory of Fulani attacks, saying climate change is causing “conflict” between two rural socio-economic groups over scarce natural resources, according to the petition.
“The United Nations and most media outlets are also following suit,” he added.
To the dismay of Nigeria’s Christians, who fear the prospect of being massacred by Islamic extremists every night, President Biden’s appointee, Richard Mills, the US ambassador to Nigeria, followed suit, telling reporters in Abuja on October 17 that deadly clashes are occurring between farmers and herders in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, although he acknowledged that many of the farmers are Christian.
“But it’s not clearly targeted at any particular group,” he said, apparently following a script from Nigeria’s president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who is trying to defuse religious tensions in the country. “This was never a serious religious issue, and it shouldn’t be.”
Nigeria is the U.S.’s second-largest trading partner in Africa, another factor that could influence public comments by Nigerian and U.S. diplomats, at the cost of thousands of Christians whom Shea’s petition cited for killing and rape so far this year, as well as more than 100 pastors and Catholic priests held hostage for ransom.
“The experience of Christians in Nigeria can be summed up as a church under Islamist annihilation,” Bishop Wilfred Anagbe of the Catholic Church said in testimony on March 12 at a hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Africa on the persecution of Christians by the Fulani in the Benue State diocese of Makurdi.
Shortly after, Fulani insurgents attacked Anagbe’s home village and massacred 12 of his relatives, the petition said. They were dead before he got home.
“We are concerned that instead of designating Nigeria as a CPC, your administration is considering placing Nigeria on the ‘Special Watch List’ of the IRF (International Religious Freedom) Act,” the petition states. “If so, this may stem from a misconception that the CPC designation requires the United States to isolate or sanction Nigeria. In fact, the IRF Act does not mandate automatic sanctions and even provides for sanctions waivers, citing a range of other possible policy responses.”
Among Mills’ comments was that he echoed the view of Nigerian officials that Islamic extremist groups kill more Muslims than Christians. This claim directly contradicts a report last year by the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa (ORFA). ORFA, which has documented that Fulani herders have killed more civilians than Boko Haram or Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), reported that data from October 2019 to September 2023 shows that most of the victims were Christians.
Of the 30,880 civilians killed during the four-year reporting period, 16,769 were Christians, compared to 6,235 Muslims. Of the 21,532 civilians abducted, 11,185 were Christians, and the number of abducted Muslims was 7,899.
According to ORFA, 154 African Traditional Religion (ATR) members were killed and 184 were abducted, while the religion of 7,722 civilians killed and 2,264 abducted was unknown.
Taking into account the relative size of Christian and Muslim populations in the states surveyed, the report found that the ratio of murdered Christians to Muslims was 6.5:1 and the ratio of abducted Christians to Muslims was 5.1:1.
Compared to the overall numbers, “the ratio of murdered Christians to Muslims increases significantly when the religious composition of each state is taken into account,” with the ratio of murdered Christians to Muslims being 2.7:1 and the ratio of abducted Christians to Muslims being 1.4:1.
The report added that 55 percent of the Christians killed were killed by armed Fulani herdsmen (9,153 people) and 29 percent by other terrorist groups (4,895 people). Boko Haram and ISWAP together account for only 8 percent of the Christians killed (1,268).
For Muslims, the perpetrators were the opposite: 24 percent of murdered Muslims were killed by armed Fulani herdsmen (1,473 people) and 53 percent by other terrorist groups (3,334 people). Boko Haram and ISWAP together account for only 12 percent of the Muslims killed (770).
IDOP, sponsored by the World Evangelical Alliance, focused on prayers for persecuted Christians on Sunday (Nov. 2) and Nov. 9, but the international community has remained largely silent, with author Greg Maresca commenting in the Canadian Free Press that Christians in Nigeria are enduring one of the worst persecutions in modern times.
“This crisis goes beyond geopolitics and foreign policy, and a moral imperative is desperately needed,” Maresca said. “As St. Paul affirms in 1 Corinthians 12:26, ’If one member suffers, all suffer together.’ As members of the Body of Christ, Christians are called to witness, speak out, and act to end the atrocities being committed across Africa. Without intervention, Christians in many regions will face displacement within a generation.”
