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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Identity

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17 April 2025

3 min read

Deeper conversations on gender will continue after this court ruling

Can the whole mystery of gender be conceded to brute biological fact?

Jack Chisnall

Jack Chisnall is a former gag teller and Oxford Theology graduate, combining the two at Holy Fooling.

A paiting shows four panels featuring women lawyers over a century

Legacy, by Catherine Yass, hangs in the Supreme Court and celebrates one hundred years of women in law.

The Supreme Court.

Every now and again, a society has to have a word with itself about something. Most social changes happen quite organically without a need for this kind of self-conscious dialogue. Hat-wearing in public was almost ubiquitous, for example, until about the middle of the twentieth century, when it simply stopped. No major debate happened about this - the hat simply sidled out of fashion. Western society just sort of internally worked out that the absence of a hat was not improper.

Whether or not gender is something real is not like whether it is polite to wear a hat. It requires a very hard conversation - one which pushes on some of the most fundamental differences people can have about politics, the world, and perhaps things even bigger than that. Whether one agrees with it or not, yesterday was a significant development in that very public conversation: the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled that the Equality Act is predicated on a classic gender ontology (i.e. the ‘realness’ of male and female).

What is at stake here? For some, the expansion of categories like ‘man’ and ‘woman’ to those who have undergone a clinical transition, and those who have an official certificate legally recognising their self-identified gender, is a crucial bellwether of our commitment to equality and freedom. They cite the rates of depression and suicide in this demographic, where an imposed gender causes deep distress.

Opponents of this move (like J. K. Rowling, who will be celebrating right now, no doubt) cite the dangers that de-anchoring gender from biological markers, like chromosomes or reproductive organs, will have. The justification of single-sex spaces is at least partially balanced on the idea that men and women are different, and separation of them is key for our sense of dignity or safety.

But both sides agree that we need copper-bottoms for our terms. All humans want to feel like our words are not empty gestures. Biological sex realists want to hold out for fundamentals which can be observed scientifically. This tallies with lots of observable features, history, and culture - but those who hold out for a definition of gender rooted in self-identification are not wrong to point out that overly medicalised definitions will struggle to divide all of the data without remainder. There are genuine cases of intersex people, for example.

What does a Christian like me think? Someone who is tied to what the Church has historically taught might look to the New Testament, where Jesus, for example, teaches that ‘male and female’ is a good, given aspect of our reality by God. That much might be consoling about the court’s decision. But a Christian may also feel a little cold about conceding the whole mystery of gender to brute biological fact. Surely there is something about being a woman or a man that is more than merely possession of certain physical features, as gender-critical activists claim?

St Paul, in one of his New Testament letters, says that men and women are an expression of something even more fundamental than chromosomes: “I speak of Christ and the Church”. But this does not make our genders into shadowy symbols. Rather, it says our gender difference is more real for pointing at is something beyond the physical. It is rooted in the most real thing a Christian knows: that God reconciles the world to himself through Jesus as if it was a cosmic marriage. On this view, maleness and femaleness is not a tick-list of attributes, but a goal at which we are all striving. It will require humility, mutual service, and love.

Society will keep on having its conversation about what exactly men and women are. But if it is to make sense of what things are really like, it may have to keep digging yet.

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