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Freedom of Belief

4 March 2024

4 min read

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.

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Freedom of Belief

Islam

16 August 2024

5 min read

Iran: defender of minorities?

Making such claims is part of a carefully managed facade.

Steve Dew-Jones

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

A toddler is held by her father while he stands next to her mother.

Lydia and her adoptive family.

It might surprise you to learn that the Islamic Republic of Iran likes to present itself as a defender of minorities.

It’s certainly not the sort of title you might associate with a country with such a grim human-rights record, amounting to “crimes against humanity” according to the findings of an independent fact-finding mission.

But akin to the template of the Russians and other rogue regimes, Iran knows well that when it comes to the international arena, appearances can often take the spotlight away from ghastly realities.

And so, when the fact-finding mission releases a report, as it did last week, outlining violations against minorities with the title They have dehumanised us, while it may achieve little in terms of change on the ground, it has the potential to at least damage the Islamic Republic’s carefully managed facade on the international stage.

In the five years I’ve been working for Iranian Christian charity Article18, I've grown extremely familiar with the way in which the Islamic Republic brings representatives of its recognised religious minorities - Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians - to the United Nations in an attempt to prove its inter-religious tolerance.

The latest example of this was in October, when the Armenian MP - one of five minority representatives in the Iranian parliament (as the Islamic Republic likes to remind us) - was rolled out before the UN Human Rights Committee to list the number of churches, synagogues and temples in Iran.

The point? That if there are so many places where minorities can worship - for the record, he referenced 380 churches, 16 synagogues and 78 temples - then how can anyone claim minorities are persecuted?

What the MP failed to mention was that those 380 churches, for example, are only open to those considered to have been born as Christians, which in Iran means Armenians or Assyrians.

Meanwhile, the door remains firmly closed to anyone who may wish to convert to Christianity or even simply visit a church to find out more.

Article 18 enshrines the freedoms to change one's faith and to share it with others. Both are denied to Iranians of all faiths and none.

This hasn’t always been the case. There were once a large and growing number of churches that welcomed converts, but over the past 15 years they were either forced to close or to change the language in which they operate. These days, churches can only preach in Assyrian or Armenian.

Last year marked the 10th anniversary of the forced closure of the largest Persian-speaking church in Iran, the Central Assemblies of God Church in Tehran, whose popularity ended up being its death knell.

Just four Persian-speaking churches remain in the whole of Iran, all Anglican, and these can only welcome those who can prove they were Christian before the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. They are not allowed to admit new members, and even these have not been permitted to reopen since their forced closure during the Covid-19 pandemic.

So, while churches in the West are often derided for their ageing populations, for Iran’s last remaining Persian-language churches, that future is entirely inevitable.

And while the Armenian MP talks about Iran’s hundreds of churches, he fails to mention that converts have nowhere to worship, as was highlighted in our #Place2Worship campaign, which was inspired by an open letter written by three converts serving long prison sentences for their membership of house-churches.

The three wanted to know where they might worship, free from the fear of being re-arrested.

Because that is why Christians are imprisoned in Iran - simply for meeting together in what we in the West call “house groups”, and what in Iran are known as “house-churches”, or, in the words of the Iranian authorities, “enemy groups”.

But it isn't only the converts who suffer. Armenians and Assyrians have themselves received long prison sentences for their decision to share their faith, a right that is enshrined in international covenants that Iran has signed, including Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, from which my organisation derives its name.

Article 18 enshrines the freedoms to change one's faith and to share it with others. Both are denied to Iranians of all faiths and none.

But they aren't quite so fond of scrutiny, such as a 17,000-word report by a credible international team of experts.

In this context, I find it both baffling and even slightly amusing whenever I see the Islamic Republic of Iran presenting itself as the defender of minorities.

Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, littered his "election" campaign with references to the “dignity” of Iran’s minorities; it’s common to see propaganda highlighting Iran's alleged defence of Christians in the region against ISIS, for example; and they love to talk about the number of churches and minority MPs that they have.

But they aren't quite so fond of scrutiny, such as a 17,000-word report by a credible international team of experts.

According to the experts, minorities in Iran face “ongoing institutionalised discrimination and marginalisation”, the “root causes” or “enablers” of which are the “gross human-rights violations against them”.

The fact-finding mission highlight the example of a couple whose adopted daughter was ruled should be taken away from them because they had become Christians and she was considered to have been born a Muslim.

I remember the story of little Lydia very well - certainly one of the most heart-wrenching of my time working with Article18.

It also produced one of the strongest reactions, with 120 lawyers and activists signing a joint letter to the head of the judiciary at the time - one Ebrahim Raisi - calling for the decision to be overturned.

It wasn’t.

And while the Islamic Republic will no doubt seek to laugh or shrug off the “politically motivated” report, as they have countless others, it is to be hoped that at least some who may have been taken in by the regime's propaganda in the past will see reason to think twice the next time around.