Nigeria is home to a church that is simultaneously expanding and enduring sustained violence, according to a new report.
Women in a village in Nigeria’s Plateau State attend a worship service. csi
By Adamu Madugu, in Nigeria
part of the CSI Fellowship for Nigerian Voices series
A new study finds that on average 11 Christians were killed every day in Nigeria between 2020 and 2023. The researchers attribute this toll to targeted persecution rather than the general insecurity Nigerian officials point to.
The report suggests that Nigeria is home to a church that is simultaneously expanding and enduring sustained violence. Its authors call on the international community and the Nigerian government to separate attacks aimed at Christians because of their faith from the wider criminal violence affecting the country.
“Thriving in the Midst of Persecution: The Church in Nigeria,” was released in late July 2026 by the Lausanne Movement, a global evangelical network that organizes conferences and research on Christian mission work. Citing data compiled by the Para-Mallam Peace Foundation and the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa, the report states that roughly 30,880 civilians died of various forms of violence during the four-year period. Of these, 16,769 were Christians and 6,235 Muslims.
Spread over the four-year period, or roughly 1,461 days, that figure works out at 11.4 Christian deaths per day. And given that about 2.7 Christians were killed for every Muslim killed, the report strongly points to Christians being victims of identity-based attacks.
Yet Nigeria’s presidency and Ministry of Information claim the violence is driven by criminality and ethnic conflict, and say that any suggestion the killings amount to Christian genocide rests on misinformation or faulty data.
Officials have repeated this argument as international attention on Nigeria’s death toll has grown, including after the United States designated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern for religious freedom violations in 2025.
Attacks in Plateau, Benue, Southern Kaduna, Nasarawa and other states in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, the region where the mostly Muslim north meets the largely Christian south, follow a recurring pattern, the report says. Villages are raided at night, churches and pastors’ homes are burned, food stores are destroyed, and the abandoned farmland is occupied.
The report also points to the 2022 Pentecost attack on St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Owo, Ondo State, in the country’s southwest, as evidence that Christians in other parts of the country are not spared by such attacks.
It cites data that shows that at the end of 2024 there were 3.4 million people internally displaced because of violence, many of them Christians.
The Sokoto Caliphate, an Islamic state established in 1804 that extended over much of what is now northern Nigeria, forms the starting point of the report’s historical account. The report links its legacy to the system of British colonial “indirect rule,” which governed through existing local authorities and left the caliphate’s religious and administrative structures largely intact after independence.
That inheritance, the report says, combined with the rise of extremist groups including Boko Haram and its offshoot, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), both of which attack Christian communities as they seek to impose their own interpretation of Islamic law.
Furthermore, the adoption of sharia criminal law by 12 northern states since 1999 has narrowed the space in which religious minorities can practice their faith without restriction, it argues.
Christians in Nigeria’s north face difficulty obtaining permits to build churches, the report says, and risk accusations of blasphemy. Such was the case with Deborah Samuel, a college student in Sokoto State who was lynched by Muslim fellow students in 2022. The report also cites cases of forced conversion and the marriage of underage Christian girls.
In April 2025, the Community Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States ruled that certain blasphemy provisions in Kano State’s penal code violated international human rights standards, a decision the report treats as evidence that Nigeria’s blasphemy laws face growing legal challenge.
Nigeria is a state party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which protects the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion under Article 18, including the freedom to manifest one’s religion in worship, observance, practice and teaching.
The same protection appears in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in Article 8 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which Nigeria has also ratified. These instruments obligate the Nigerian state to refrain from restricting religious practice directly, and to protect individuals from violence carried out by non-state actors because of their religion.
The pattern of attacks the report documents, along with the barriers to building churches and the blasphemy prosecutions it cites, raises questions about how far Nigeria has met that obligation, independent of the government’s account of what is driving the violence.
The report’s authors write that the visibility of Nigeria’s mega-churches and its gospel musicians abroad may obscure the violence taking place in rural areas.
“A thriving Church is not a sign of safety; rather, it is a sign of a faith that refuses to die,” the report concludes.
The CSI Fellowship for Nigerian Voices is a six-month program for a select cohort of Nigerian journalists to shed light on the struggle that local Christian communities have been facing in the Middle Belt, thus increasing public awareness and engagement by the international community.
