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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1 July 2025

5 min read

Reading Don Quixote is making me a better person

Learning from Cervantes’ mistakes

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

Statues of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza point toward a windmill

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza statues, Tandil, Argentina.

Alena Grebneva, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I love reading, but I’m not very well read. As is often the case, a curmudgeonly teacher quashed any interest I had in literature in my last few years of school; the increasing creep of technology and social media into my life means my diminishing attention span often makes reading seem a herculean task. It’s a long time to sit still and not doomscroll.

It’s only in recent years that I’ve rediscovered a love of reading. As part of this, I’m trying to right some literary wrongs.

Okay, confession time: I’ve never read anything by Jane Austin, the Bronte sisters, George Elliot, Tolstoy, or Proust. I haven’t read The Lord of the Rings or Moby Dick nor To The Lighthouse or Heart of Darkness. I know. Bad, isn’t it? I could go on, too …

I love reading, but I’m not very well read.

And so I’m making an effort to read some of the Great Books of the canon. At the moment, I’m reading Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Crucially, I’m reading Edith Grossman’s 2003 translation of the novel. It is an absolute joy.

I had heard that it was deeply funny, and a work of genius; neither aspect of the text has been a surprise to me. But there’s something about Grossman’s translation in particular that has caught me off guard: the mistakes.

Not any mistakes by Grossman. I know nothing whatsoever about Spanish, let alone 17th Century Spanish (another dream crushed by another teacher), but the English text is a marvel. Eminently readable and funny without compromising the occasional complexity of Cervantes’ prose.

No: I mean the mistakes by Cervantes himself. Early on, a footnote from Grossman points out that Sancho Panza (Don Quixote’s long-suffering squire) refers to his wife using several different names throughout the text. Without Grossman’s footnotes, I’m sure I would have overthought this. What is the author trying to say about Sancho Panza? Is it a comment on his intelligence? Or the character’s view of women, perhaps? Am I just too dense to understand what’s going on here?

Grossman’s assessment? It’s just “an oversight”. A mistake. And quite a basic one, at that. Later on, Cervantes divides up his chapters, using those brief sentences summarising their contents that are common in this period (“Chapter III, In which …”). But they’re all wrong. Things are said to happen in Chapter X that don’t actually happen until Chapter XV; the chapter summaries are a mess, frankly.

One of the things that made me reluctant to read Great Books for so long is that they’re intimidating. They are certified Works of Genius and therefore probably a bit much for my little brain to digest. Many of the archetypical Great Books compound this by being incredibly long, too: think Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, or even more recent candidates like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest or Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob. Don Quixote itself runs to nearly 1,000 pages long; it carries a literal and literary heft to it.

But there it is. Full of mistakes.

It turns out to have been quite an opportune moment for me to read Don Quixote. I’m in the final stages of preparing for my second book to come out. (It’s an academic Christian theology book, so will probably sell slightly less than Don Quixote but will certainly cost much more to buy). This means it’s been quite a stressful season for me, as I try to catch any lingering mistakes that might have somehow slipped through the myriad rounds of copyediting, or find myself wondering if the book isn’t just so bad that I’m going to be forced to return my PhD, leave academia forever, and by sued by my publisher for besmirching their good name by association.

This has also been a time of being deeply frustrated with my own humanity. Why aren’t I a better writer? Why can’t I spell properly? Why aren’t I more creative? Why aren’t I better at this? Why am I so … limited?

As an academic, imposter syndrome never really goes away. You just learn to cope with it. And reading Don Quixote and seeing these mistakes in the text has helped me reframe who I am, and my own limitations. Here is a text that is human; completely and utterly human. And so, naturally, here is a text with mistakes; text that is imperfect and flawed. And therein lies its part of its charm. It is rough and coarse, and I love it for that. The mistakes in Don Quixote haven’t detracted from my enjoyment of the text, they’ve enhanced it. They’ve underscored the beautiful humanity that is so evident in Cervantes’ work.

The Christian Bible is at pains to tell me that I am “fearfully and wonderfully made,” as the Psalmist puts it. I can be so quick to forget this when I focus all my attention on my limitations, and flaws, and missteps. This is why I’m so grateful for Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote. Above all else, I’m grateful for its mistakes. Like me, it is utterly human. Like me, this means it is utterly flawed. Like me, that makes it a work of utter beauty.

Don Quixote is helping me to recognise the inherent beauty of my limitations as a creature. In doing so, it’s helping me to recognise the inherent beauty of the One who created me. It’s helping me to fall more in love with the God who sent His Son to Earth to become human like me, to revel in and live alongside me in my humanity. Warts and all.

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