We’re ignoring Nigeria's hellish underbelly

Why the West averts its gaze from anti-Christian violence there.

Chris Wadibia

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development.

A burnt out motor cycle and car stand amid charred debris in a dusty compound.

Burned vehicles after Good Friday raid on April 7, 2023, in Ngban, Benue state, Nigeria.

Justice, Development, and Peace Commission.

Moments ago a Christian was killed in Nigeria—again. For the 100 million Christians living in Nigeria, news of brutal murders of their fellow worshippers has become commonplace. Every day 14 Christians in Nigeria die because of their faith. Nigeria is a land of extreme paradoxes known for many things. It’s one of the world’s leading oil producers. It’s home to the globally popular Afrobeats music scene. Its distinguished citizens include director-general of the World Trade Organisation Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, president of the African Development Bank Akinwumi Adesina, Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations Amina Mohammed, and former president of the International Criminal Court Chile Eboe-Osuji, just to name a few. Its global diaspora of 17 million consists of Nigerians working in positions of power in virtually every industry imaginable. From banking, finance, and tech to professional sports, higher education, healthcare, culinary arts, and consulting, there is not a single major industry in the world whose list of leaders does not include a Nigerian name.

But just as every coin has two sides, so does Nigeria. Nigeria's story is incomplete without explaining its hellish underbelly. Well over 60 per cent of Nigeria's population, or at least 133 million of its citizens, live in a state of multidimensional poverty. The vast oil wealth generated by its oil industry only benefits a minuscule sliver of its elephantine population.

Nigeria is the global leader in anti-Christian violence. Since 2009, over 52,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria by Islamist extremists. In the last 15 years, over 18,000 churches and 2,200 schools in Nigeria have been set on fire. Open Doors, a charity whose mission focuses on providing support to persecuted Christians globally, estimates that 90 per cent of murders targeting Christians across the world in 2022 took place in Nigeria. Islamist extremists killed at least 145 Nigerian Catholic priests in 2022 alone.

Anti-Christian violence is evil just like antisemitic and Islamophobic violence are both evil.

For people enjoying religious freedom in Europe and the United States, violence against Christians feels like a thing of the past. The concept of anti-Christian violence in the West triggers thoughts of Europe's religious wars in the 16th, 17th, and early 18th centuries, or The Troubles between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland in the 20th century.

However, the scale of anti-Christian violence in Nigeria puts it in a league of its own. In the West we take for granted the freedom of religion because we have had it for so long. It is human nature to take for granted the aspects of life we have grown most accustomed to. Ongoing war between Israel and Hamas has reignited in Western public debate the pervasive, threatening existence of antisemitism and Islamophobia in Western societies.

But why has the consistent, monstrously murderous Christophobia in Nigeria that has unfolded in the last two decades not cemented its place within Western public discourse? Do Christians in the West only demand action when White Christians get murdered? Are 52,000 brutal, gory killings of Black Christian bodies in Sub-Saharan Africa not sufficient reason for the powers that be in global Christian society to mobilise their vast political, military, and economic resources to intervene, protect, and bring peace?

Christians running for their lives in Nigeria are as much part of the bride of Christ as Southern Baptists sipping sweet tea in Alabama on a Sunday afternoon.

Violence against Christians is not a thing of the past. It is as real a phenomenon today as it has ever been. Few states in the Majority World have developed for themselves a reputation for institutional ineptitude and malfeasance more so than Nigeria. Solutions for ending Nigeria's anti-Christian violence will not come from the Nigerian state. Instead, they must come from the religious sector, civil society, foreign governments, and private actors. Anti-Christian violence in Nigeria is not motivated solely by extremist Islamist zealotry, albeit the influence of this element certainly plays a part. Poverty, competition for scarce resources, and relative deprivation along with educational underdevelopment and political profiteering on the heel of Christophobia are collectively responsible for these violent acts.

In Christian theology, Jesus Christ has a bride; this bride is the church, or all who believe in Christ and follow his teachings. Christians running for their lives in Nigeria are as much part of the bride of Christ as Southern Baptists sipping sweet tea in Alabama on a Sunday afternoon, Anglicans enjoying a Sunday roast, or Pentecostals in São Paolo playing football on the beach after a midweek worship service. The killing of one Christian in Nigeria is an assault on the 2.4 billion Christians living across the world. Christ has only one bride, and He lovingly cares for each member of His bride equally, overwhelmingly, and powerfully.

Anti-Christian violence is evil just like anti-semitic and Islamophobic violence are both evil. Western media’s reluctance to report about these murders and offer platforms to activists, clerics, and stakeholders whose voices can help galvanise support for ending this violence cannot be separated from irreducibly influential Western religious gazes that dehumanise and deprioritise the lives, experiences, and sufferings of non-White Christians globally. Until anti-Christian violence in Nigeria comes to an end, the collective dignity of Christians worldwide will remain tainted by a scourge those with power are too apathetic to eradicate.

Article

America

Church and state

Comment

Idolatry

Politics

7 November 2024

4 min read

Trump's triumph is not the end of the world, nor the dawn of a new age

Donald Trump may not be as bad as many fear and not as good as many hope

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Silhoutted by a sun rise, a helicopter flies over The White House

Marine One Flying over The White House, Inauguration Day, 2017.

Anthony Quintano, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Reading reactions to Donald Trump's election win across different news outlets over the last couple of days has been an education in the contemporary political landscape.

For left-leaning media the future is dark. An Atlantic opinion piece laments that “we must learn to live in an America where an overwhelming number of our fellow citizens have chosen a president who holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, even our military in contempt.” The Guardian called it “an extraordinary, devastating moment in the history of the United States.” It is a secular version of the sermon: “The End Is Nigh”.

Yet turn to the Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, or anything on the right, and you find a mixture of gloating (“Trump’s triumph is a disaster for Starmer and the self-regarding, virtue-signalling elites!”) and optimism that a new day is dawning. Trump himself hailed the advent of a ‘golden age’ for the American people. Having been mired in misery since the Conservatives’ routing in the UK general election here is a welcome bit of good news for those on the right.

On either side the apocalyptic note is hard to miss. A Telegraph writer says: “2024 is the real deal, a revolutionary moment, a reconstitution and realignment of American and Western politics around fresh principles.” A Guardian writer says that “there is nothing but bad news for Europe in Donald Trump’s US election victory. The only question is just how bad it will get.”

Immediately after elections there’s always a bit of this apocalyptic tone. When Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party dismantled the ‘red wall’, winning traditionally secure Labour seats in 2019, the rhetoric was that this was a generational change, a fundamental re-alignment in UK politics to the right. Labour, surely, was finished. Five years later, after Keir Starmer’s landslide and the routing of the Tories, it all looks very different – at least here in the UK.

Politicians always, in the long run, fail... The question is how badly they fail and whether they are able to do some good along the way until they do so.

Tony Blair fell from grace due to misleading us all over the Iraq war. David Cameron fell because he lost a referendum over Brexit. Boris Johnson was ousted because he allowed parties in Downing Street while the rest of the country was locked down. George W. Bush pursued a disastrous campaign for regime change in the middle east. Barack Obama started with great hope, won a second term, but didn’t change gun laws and was widely thought to have weakened the US through a failed foreign policy. Joe Biden is thought to have failed because he let inflation grow rampant and allowed American borders become too porous.

Donald Trump will fail too. He may, as he promised, deliver an improved economy. He may stem illegal immigration. That, after all, is why many voted for him. But eventually he will disappoint. So would Kamala Harris if she had won. So will Keir Starmer. And that is not to criticise these particular leaders. Like football managers, they all get sacked in the end, and there are very few who like Sir Alex Ferguson, or Jed Bartlett, get to wave farewell to the crowds at the time of their own choosing. Even then, Fergie’s legacy was tainted by his inability to create a legacy, and Bartlett was, despite our misty-eyed nostalgia, a fictional President.

It’s always tempting to reach for apocalyptic language at times like this. Yet the real meaning of ‘apocalypse’ is ‘revelation’, or ‘unveiling’. Taking the longer view, perhaps the real apocalyptic moment at times like these is the unveiling of the true place of politics – as important, but not ultimately important. These moments reveal the inadequacy of all human kingdoms, and our longing for a different kingdom, a kingdom of ‘righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit’ as the Bible has it, things that no government or election result can ever deliver.

Politics matters because the way we live together matters. Yet what politics at its best can provide – a well-functioning economy, law and order, managing good international relations - only go so far in enabling a flourishing life. Like returning to a familiar drug that we think we can once and for all make us happy, despite the numerous times it has failed before, we still somehow believe that politics can solve all our problems. “Trump will fix it” said the banners – though in fact that is what every politician promises. Jesus warned: “Many will come in my name and say ‘I am he’, and lead many astray.”

Most probably, Donald Trump will not be as bad as many fear, and not as good as many hope. Because politics is never the final word. As American theologian, Matthew Burdette put it recently: “The solution to our politics is not a political solution. Voting for the right or the wrong candidate will not change the situation: the devil is happily bipartisan, so long as politics is our idol. No, what is needed is fundamentally and thoroughly spiritual. Only when we can say with the prophet Isaiah that “the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as dust on the scales,” that is, only when we can see against the horizon of the ultimate how small are our worries, will these relative, penultimate things like politics be set right and take on their true meaning in our lives.”