Article
Comment
Freedom of Belief
4 min read

We’re ignoring Nigeria's hellish underbelly

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

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
Comment
Conspiracy theory
Politics
5 min read

Charlie Kirk: the problem is not murder but anger

How to confront the rage in politics, in media, and in ourselves

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

An aerial view of a gazebo at the site of the Charlie Kirk shooting
The site of the shooting.
KSL News Utah, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The killing of Charlie Kirk has shaken most of us – including me. Over the past year or so, his pop-up debates on US university campuses kept appearing on my different social media channels, and they were fascinating. Here was a young, articulate conservative, venturing into college campuses – generally left-leaning, progressive places - opening up conversation, debate and challenge. He was opinionated, provocative, unafraid to voice unpopular opinions, generated hostility, but seldom seemed to show it himself. No question was off limits, he seemed to respect those who attacked him, and he made no secret of his profound Christian faith.  

I agreed with some of what he said but by no means all of it – that’s the point of public debate. His views on gun control, Israel, and Donald Trump would be some way from mine. But inviting debate on controversial issues, seeking to change other people’s minds by discussion and reasonable argument is the very heart of a well-functioning democracy. There are precious few spaces where progressives & conservatives talk – and Charlie Kirk’s campus debates were one of them. It’s tragic that they cost him his life.  

In our times, such heinous acts are not usually committed by some secret, politically-motivated cabal, but often by an unhinged or deluded self-radicalised loner, influenced by fringe groups in politics or culture. In the UK, Axel Rudakubana, who killed three young girls in Southport, turned out not to be a terrorist after all (“he did not kill to further a political, religious or ideological cause” said the judge on sentencing) but a disturbed and lonely young man who killed for no apparent reason other than mental instability. The same was true for Ali Harbi Ali who stabbed the Conservative MP David Amess, Sirhan Sirhan who shot Robert F Kennedy, James L. Ray who murdered Martin Luther King, even (despite all the conspiracy theories) Lee Harvey Oswald who killed John F. Kennedy. All of them fit this category of lonely, unbalanced people who kill because of some grievance, sometimes loosely politically motivated, but usually acting alone. Conspiracy theories are alluring, but usually unfounded.  

It's tempting when something like this happens to draw all kinds of wider political and cultural lessons. And there have been no shortage of them over these past days. “Because they could not prove him wrong, they murdered him” went one trope. The problem with that is that ‘they’ did not kill him. One young man - now in custody - did. To imply that every left-leaning person in the USA or elsewhere is somehow responsible for Kirk’s death ironically colludes with the darker motivations of this act. 

It's Jesus who explains why. “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.' But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.”  

Sounds harsh. We all think murder is wrong, but losing your temper with a work colleague? Calling your neighbour an idiot because of who they vote for?  

The saying points to the root of murder as rage. And boy, is there rage around today.  

There are different kinds of anger. There is the red-hot furious kind where your blood boils and your temperature rises. Yet that kind of anger can settle into different mood - a hardened, determined malice, a fixed hatred of the person who provoked your anger in the first place and a determination to get your revenge, or to silence them once and for all. What both kinds have in common is the red mist that descends and remains, leaving an inability to see past the enmity, a refusal to see the humanity in the other person - the fact that they are, at the end of the day, a ‘brother’ as Jesus put it - a blindness to the essential commonality between you and the person you hate.  

Anger is a dangerous thing for us humans. It deceives us into thinking that because we think we are in the right it gives us license to do despicable things.

Killings like this have always occurred, from Julius Caesar, to Abraham Lincoln, to Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to Yitzhak Rabin. And they always will. No political solution will ever erase the possibility of a mentally disturbed or angry person taking it into their own hands to murder another human being, particularly one with political prominence.  

Yet we can do something. When we build algorithms that encourage the strongest and most extreme views, a media culture that highlights argument and division, refuse to see the common humanity in people we disagree with, when we demonise the opposition and blame them for all the ills of society that we see, we sow the seeds that enable this kind of tragic event to happen.  

Another deceptively simple piece of New Testament wisdom runs: “Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.”  

It is good advice. Yes, we will get angry from time to time. But don’t let it take root. Sometimes a certain righteous anger can be a good thing – but it’s rare. Anger is a dangerous thing for us humans. It deceives us into thinking that because we think we are in the right (and we may well be) it gives us license to do despicable things. The heart of Christian wisdom on anger is that it is God’s prerogative to exercise wrath. Our anger, however initially righteous, tends to harden into something more sinister. God alone can sustain righteous anger that will truly bring justice. 

The right response to the murder of Charlie Kirk, the response that reflects the Christian faith that was so important to him, is not to blame it on an entire group of people, to tar them with the brush of the deluded young man who committed this terrible deed, but to see again the essential humanity that we share with our enemies. It is to actively cultivate a culture that encourages restraint rather than rage. It is to learn to be ruthless with our own tendency to hold grudges, our own deep-seated hostility to those whose views we find repulsive. It is to learn to hate racism, but to love the racist, to hate crime, but to love the criminal.  

To respond wisely is to recognise that even my enemy - whether progressive or conservative - is a human being created and loved by God, a fellow sinner like me, and to look for the things we have in common, more than our differences. When Jesus taught us to love our enemies, he may have asked us to do something supremely difficult, but it is the only thing that can overcome the kind of malice that led to the tragic death of Charlie Kirk. 

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