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

Comment

Nationalism

Politics

16 January 2025

3 min read

The dangerous prayer that Donald Trump just prayed

What it really means to call on God in an age of messianic mimicry.

Jared Stacy

Jared holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

The US Capitol, where Donald trump will be inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States

The most important moment in the inauguration occurred in a blink of an eye. A matter of seconds. As President-elect Trump takes the oath of office, he voiced a prayer spanning four simple words, “so help me God.”

This isn’t the first prayer we’ve heard from these steps. Trump echoed prayers offered by a mob of his supporters ascending those very Capitol steps just a few years ago. The reality of pardons characterised this administration from Day One. Perhaps, in a few years’ time, a statue to a J6er will stand in the Capitol Rotunda. I remember reading that prediction from a journalist in the days immediately following, and couldn’t imagine it. Now? I can.

The party platform has become the communion table. Our prayers are filled with content of ideology and theology. We have shown ourselves to be captive to the zeitgeist of our time, consuming propaganda and debating the “truth” about January 6, 2021 in ways that betray our own capitulation, justifying an ascendant administration casting the shadow of authoritarianism with its aspirational populism and tech oligarchs.

To invoke the God of the Christian faith is to invite dispossession and disillusionment with all we once counted “necessary” and took for granted

We cannot consider what it is to be Christian before American. This collusion makes it clear why and how Trump assumes the Presidency as a convicted felon without losing much of his “Christian” base. Why? Because we failed to pay attention to the prayers of January 6^th. To the god they revealed in our midst, and the militant devotion this god demands. A god who is a paranoiac, split between ideology and theology, whose spirit bears the name “Jesus” only in messianic mimicry.

How might we regain our footing and our faith? It begins with taking prayer seriously. If the Christian life is—ever and always—a “life of calling upon God” (as the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth put it) then our attention must be placed upon this small little prayer packaged in the Oath. Perhaps we pray this prayer ourselves: “So help us God.”

Because it is a dangerous prayer. We have forgotten: it is dangerous to call on God. This presidential prayer invokes divine aid to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution, but to invoke the God of the Christian faith is to invite dispossession and disillusionment with all we once counted “necessary” and took for granted, all as the consequence of encountering the Crucified One.

Some see in Trump the advent of revival in America. Some see in Trump democracy’s executioner. But to invoke the name of God in America is to make us radically free and thus responsible to God’s command of peace and justice.

The Dutch Reformed pastor, K.H. Miskotte, whose ministry took place in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, saw it clearly: this God is a saboteur. To invoke this God invites sabotage, and grants us a dissenting faith, one marked by abject denial and disbelief in all other claims to totality and authority and power.

Might we dare to believe such power operates in and through a prayer that cynics count as propaganda?

If the rogue word became Trump and rages among us; then it is the responsibility of Christians to remember as well the Word once for all delivered to the Saints. And the surest sign of this remembrance is not activism first, but the renewal of our prayers.

There is then, a powerful reality at work in this four word prayer. To pray to the God of Jesus Christ is to invoke and provoke sabotage of all our schemes, our slogans, our rogue words. And even in this, we can be confident that this triumph of God is for our good. It was Walter Wink who, with an eye on the earliest Christians, came to ask

“What happens when the State executes those who are praying for it? Even as the lions lapped the blood of the saints in the Roman Colosseum, Caesar was stripped of his arms and led captive in Christ’s triumphal procession.”

Might we dare to believe such power operates in and through a prayer that cynics count as propaganda?

In the renewal of our prayers, perhaps a truly Christian resistance can emerge in our days. A resistance grounded in confession, a witness in word and work to the risen Jesus who lives against all messianic mimicry, who promises us a Spirit “of malice towards none and charity for all”—as Lincoln recognized, in his own inaugural address to the American people in 1864.

May we continue to pray, “so help us, God,” unafraid of where this God leads us in freedom.