Podcast: Why is Nigeria the deadliest place for Christians?

Abi McDougal (00:03)

Nigeria is the deadliest place in the world to be a Christian. Many people who care about persecution in the world may have heard this, but there’s no military patrol arresting people for worshiping Christ. And about half of Nigeria’s population identifies as Christian. So why is it so dangerous? My name is Abi and I’m your host here at the Christian Solidarity Podcast, where we stand as one with the body of Christ facing persecution around the world.

At Christian Solidarity International, CSI, we partner with local Christian organizations to support religious freedom and human dignity for everyone. Our goal is to help followers of Christ, of all different traditions, stand together with those facing persecution. In a 24-7 news cycle, it can feel overwhelming to even know where to begin. So we want to help you stay informed, give practically, pray consistently, and speak out about the suffering happening in the world with our hope always in Christ’s ultimate redemption.

Our partners are located in India, Syria, Myanmar and more. You can find the full list online on our website at csi-int.org. But today we’re talking about Nigeria.

So Joel Veldkamp and I are here on the podcast today.

Joel.

Joel Veldkamp (01:42)

Hi, Abi.

Abi McDougal (01:43)

Joel is CSI’s Director of Public Advocacy. Joel, so you have been to Nigeria

Joel Veldkamp (01:50)

I have, yeah. I’ve had the privilege to travel to Nigeria five times during my time with CSI. The first time was way back in March 2013. And at that time, the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram had already been killing Christians in Nigeria for four years. But looking back on that from today, I would say that was early days. That was kind of at the beginning of the huge… long-lasting persecution of Christians in Nigeria that we’ve seen.

Abi McDougal (02:18)

Do you have particular memories that stand out for you from your times there of your experiences?

Joel Veldkamp (02:25)

I do, yeah. We went to a church near the capital city of Abuja. This was a church that had been attacked on Christmas Day in 2011, so about 18 months before we visited. They had had a Christmas mass at 6 a.m. and at about 8.30 a.m. as people were starting to leave to drive out of the parking lot, a car pulled up to the parking lot and tried to go into the parking lot. And the… guard stopped the car and then the car exploded and something like 43 people were killed at the church. I was able to meet with one woman who was not at the church but her entire family was. She had stayed behind to prepare the Christmas dinner for her family but her husband and their five children had gone and her husband and three of those children were killed in the explosion and her other two children were wounded.

and by this time I had already been working for CSI for a while. and I’d gotten to go to, South Sudan and, ⁓ Lebanon and Egypt and a few other places, but I had never really met someone before whose entire family had been killed in an act of persecution. And that was really.

That’s something that happened to me over and over again when I was in Nigeria. I would meet someone and we’d want to hear their story. And their story was that they’re the lone survivor of their family or almost a lone survivor. ⁓ But this woman told us her story and then she told us that, well, we asked her, you know, why do you think this happened? Why do you think these people wanted to hurt you and your family? And she said, I have no idea. I just pray for God to forgive them.

I can’t understand it, so I’ve given it to God and I want him to forgive them. That’s all. that was a very humbling thing to hear from someone who had suffered so much. And I think the church in the West has a lot to learn from Christian Nigerians.

Abi McDougal (04:13)

Wow.

Yeah, for sure.

Joel Veldkamp (04:28)

so at the church there were several people like this woman who had lost almost their entire family or their entire family in the explosion. then traveling in other places in the country you began to see that Nigeria really is different in the scale of the killing. This is not just people being driven from their homes or people being arrested or people being falsely charged with blasphemy like we see in other countries, although those things do happen in Nigeria. But in Nigeria, it’s really the wholesale killing of Christians is something to behold.

Abi McDougal (05:03)

Yeah. Yeah. as you’re telling that story, it is absolutely really humbling to think about someone having experienced that kind of devastation and still turn that over to God and still say, Christ’s forgiveness is real and strong enough even here to work in the world and to provide a hope for redemption. When we look at Nigeria as a country as a whole,

What does violence against Christians typically look like?

Joel Veldkamp (05:34)

Yeah, so I think it’s important to understand that when we talk about Nigeria being the deadliest place in the world for Christians, there are huge parts of this country that are very safe. And in part that’s because Nigeria is a huge country. ⁓ It’s very large physically, and it has between 200-250 million people living there. Just an enormous country. ⁓ The north of Nigeria is majority Muslim.

The south of Nigeria is majority Christian and in the middle you have regions where Muslims and Christians are kind of mixed and live together. ⁓ And where we’ve seen this kind of violence, this mass violence against Christians has been in the northeast of the country and in the center of the country, an area that we call the Middle Belt. This violence is directed against Christians from different kinds of armed groups. There are groups like Boko Haram, which is an Islamist terrorist organization. They’re very ideological. Their goal is to set up an Islamic state ruled by Sharia in Nigeria. And as part of that goal, they’re trying to exterminate the Christian population of the country. ⁓ Then in the Middle Belt, you have militia groups attacking Christian villages and driving out their inhabitants. And there it seems more like

This is an attempt to take the Christians’ land and create a Muslim-only zone, ⁓ which would have economic benefits for the people who are taking the land, but also political benefits for certain political actors in Nigeria. But in both cases, the violence is just incredible, really indiscriminate, completely indiscriminate. They come into a village and they just kill everyone they can until everyone has either fled or is dead.

Abi McDougal (07:25)

And so then after these attacks on villages have been carried out, do people go back to live there or what happens to them?

Joel Veldkamp (07:33)

Sometimes they go back, but usually not. And what we’re seeing is, especially in the Middle Belt, in this kind of contested zone, there’s a steady creep of ethnic cleansing happening. A lot of villages that used to be Christian villages are now either empty or inhabited by Muslims. And their old names have been changed to new names in the Hausa language or the Fulani language that’s spoken by the Muslim communities in the area. ⁓

So it’s not just random killings, it’s actually there’s a push to take territory, to take land, to push these people out of their homeland and turn the Middle Belt into a Muslim-only zone.

Abi McDougal (08:16)

Yeah. And so as you were describing this, I think you already gave us some of the context, but I know we talked in our episode about Nagorno-Karabakh in episode one about that being ethnic cleansing. And you use that same term here. So can you dig into a little bit more of what that is and how that applies in this situation with the ideologies and with the actions happening behind that?

Joel Veldkamp (08:41)

Sure, maybe I can tell a little bit of history of Nigeria. Nigeria was a British colony, but before it was a British colony, in the north of the country, there were several Sultanates or caliphates. So these are little Islamic kingdoms. And one of them was founded by a man named Usman dan Fodio and he was a religious reformer and also the leader of a jihad. His goal was to purify Islam among the Muslims who already lived in Northern Nigeria and then to spread Islam by force all the way south to the Atlantic Ocean. His goal famously was to dip his Quran in the Atlantic Ocean.

⁓ So that was the first jihad against the people of the Middle Belt, who were not yet Christians because the British hadn’t yet arrived and there hadn’t been this massive evangelization drive driven by mostly British missionaries. But the peoples of the Middle Belt resisted this jihad and the jihad sputtered out. But when the British came, the British had to find a way to administer this huge country that they had colonized. And they went to the Middle Belt and they saw hundreds of different ethnic groups who all spoke different languages and was just very confusing to them. But then they went a little farther north and they found a caliphate. And a caliphate, they knew what that was. They knew how to work with it. They’d already done so in different parts of the world. So the British turned responsibility for ruling the Middle Belt over to these Fulani Muslim rulers.

So one of the legacies of British colonialism in Nigeria is that there is this hierarchy where Muslims from the Fulani ethnic group dominate the security services, they dominate the military, and they have a tradition of ruling. And there is this kind of ingrained sense of entitlement that the Middle Belt really belongs to them. Whereas the indigenous peoples of the Middle Belt, who by today are almost all Christian, really resist that and really feel like this land belongs to them.

So when we talk about ethnic cleansing, this is an attempt to finish what Usman dan Fodio started. It’s an attempt to decide who the land really belongs to by the goal here is not necessarily to convert people. It’s not necessarily to establish Sharia law. The goal is to make sure that there are no Christians living there anymore. That’s why I use the term ethnic cleansing orslow motion ethnic cleansing, we can say. This is a plan to transform the character of the people who are living in this region for political reasons.

Abi McDougal (11:23)

Yeah, that’s a really helpful background explanation. Thank you, Joel.

can’t really make sense of anything happening right now unless we get into that history in that context of how all this came to be.

looking at these different regions, let’s talk a little bit about the North. So this summer, one of CSI’s partners that we have direct contact with in the Northeast in Borno State was abducted on June 1st. And then he was held and was not released for 51 days with the group of himself and 10 others that he was with. can you… explain a little bit about the situation and the trends that are happening of aggression in that northern region.

Joel Veldkamp (12:10)

Sure, and this is particularly the northeast border region of Nigeria, which was the spring of the Boko Haram movement. So this is a really hardcore, ideological jihadist movement, which has splintered now into several groups, some of which are aligned with ISIS, some of which are more independent. But between 2009 and I would say 2014, the violence in this region was really, really intense.

And since that time, the Nigerian government took the offensive against Boko Haram and its allies and beat them back somewhat. But the reality is that hundreds of thousands of people who were driven from their homes during those years are still displaced. And a lot of them live in displacement camps in the cities because the cities are considered safer. It’s in the countryside where Boko Haram still has a lot of power.

So Father Afina, our project partner who was kidnapped by Boko Haram in June and released in July of this year, his story kind of illustrates that because he was traveling through the countryside from one city to another when he was taken. His convoy was passing through a military checkpoint and all of a sudden that checkpoint and all the cars on the road were attacked and he was abducted along with some other people. And we do think that this abduction was probably targeted, that they knew who he was, because they knew that he was working to keep the displaced population alive. So the situation for Christians in Northeast Nigeria today is that most of them are in a state of permanent displacement in these camps around cities like Maiduguri or other cities in Northeast Nigeria.

And there CSI is able with brave Nigerians like Father Afina to provide aid, food aid and medical aid, but also aid helping people start businesses, helping them find ways to rebuild their lives in the new situation that they find themselves in.

Abi McDougal (14:12)

Yeah, yeah. that’s part of CSI’s approach partnering with the local community is that then Father Afina within his diocese was already serving these people, right? And so then CSI is helping to provide a way to get food. I mean, really basic resources that people need after they’re displaced.

and so the partners who are there are bearing the risk because they themselves are living in these same, you know, conflict conditions that are directly affecting their communities. Can you tell us a little bit more about Father Afina’s story? Because if I understand correctly, he actually had left Nigeria and chose to go back home to serve. Is that right?

Joel Veldkamp (14:57)

Yeah, so he had been serving in Alaska actually in the United States for almost a decade in a local parish in Alaska. But even while he was there, he always had the intention to go back to his homeland, to go back to Nigeria to of his community. He’s from Northeast Nigeria. And even while he was living in the United States, he was taking courses on how to deal with trauma, on how to help people who have survived traumatic experiences knowing that he was going to go back to help the communities affected by Boko Haram’s attacks. So he’s really a tremendous individual. We consider him a model of solidarity with the body of Christ. He did what we try to do. We don’t run away from persecution. We don’t try to separate ourselves from the persecuted church. We try to be close to them. We try to connect them with their fellow Christians around the world.

So yeah, was abducted on June 1st, I believe, of this year. Some of his staff were actually killed in that attack, including a man named Zayan Japet. And we try to pray for his family. Whenever we thank God for Father Afina’s safe release, we also try to remember Mr. Zayan Japet and his family. ⁓ But they were driven into the bush and then forced to walk up a mountain in the jungle towards the Boko Haram hideout. And there he was kept as a prisoner for 51 days until he was finally released.

Abi McDougal (16:24)

And really, I mean, based on other stories we’ve heard of abductions, the fact that he and those who were taken captive with him were even allowed to stay alive for 51 days is already so extraordinary and miraculous.

Joel Veldkamp (16:41)

Yeah, and we didn’t know what was going to happen to Father Afina. Sometimes Christian leaders, especially in Nigeria, are kidnapped and then executed on video. And then Boko Haram or other groups will circulate these videos on the internet in order to terrorize the Christian community. So the fact that we hadn’t heard from Father Afina for so long after his kidnapping, that was actually my fear, was that they had killed him and they were going to… that the next time we saw him it would be in one of these horrible videos. But thank God he is safe back home now. And yeah, this is the reality unfortunately for a lot of Christians in Nigeria.

Abi McDougal (17:20)

there targeted attacks on clergy in this area? Or is this, is it affecting all Christians equally?

Joel Veldkamp (17:27)

So kidnapping is a plague all across Nigeria, actually. It’s one of these situations where kidnapping has become so profitable that it’s become a little criminal enterprise, actually. So thousands of people are kidnapped every year. We do think in regions like the Middle Belt, Christians tend to be targeted more because they’re seen as safer targets and because…

the militia groups that are already organized to drive Christians off their land have this capacity to target people for kidnapping.

Abi McDougal (17:59)

that goes back to this ethnic hierarchical concept and history that you were talking about earlier, right? these people are not going to be protected because they don’t have the same resources behind them, Christians typically don’t, is that right?

Joel Veldkamp (18:12)

Absolutely, this hierarchy and this ideology kind of provide the framework in which people can justify to themselves kidnapping another human being, right? The economic motives are there, but they still need a way to make sense of it to themselves, I can say. So in the Middle Belt, it’s that these people don’t belong here. This land is really ours. We need to get rid of them anyway. And so that’s why…

Abi McDougal (18:31)

sure.

Joel Veldkamp (18:40)

Christians then specifically are targeted for kidnapping in that region. But we do think that clergy are targeted more often than the average. And again, part of the reason is that when clergy are attacked, that weakens the entire Christian community and it will be easier to get rid of the Christian community. But also there is a perception that because Christian clergy are little more prominent, maybe one can get a better ransom for a priest than just for an average random Nigerian person. But either way, it is a very dangerous country, at least in some regions, to be a priest or to be a pastor.

Abi McDougal (19:18)

And so then towards that Middle Belt region, there’s been some pretty major attacks this year. Right before Easter, there were attacks during Holy Week, this spring, then there were attacks again during the summer. Can you walk us through the situation there?

Joel Veldkamp (19:36)

Sure, most of the attacks that you mentioned happened in a place called Plateau State, which has really been the epicenter of these attacks on Christians for almost 25 years now. But on Palm Sunday, actually this year, there was a massacre of about 56 Christians in their village. These Fulani militiamen came at night on motorbikes with machetes and just went house to house killing people.

And actually our CSI’s own program manager for Nigeria arrived in the main city in the area in Plateau State the day before this happened. And this is not the first time that CSI staff have been present while a massacre of Christians is happening. And that just gives an indication of how frequent this actually is that we’ll have massacres on this scale in Nigeria. But so our program manager was able to visit the hospital two days after the massacre and meet some of the survivors. And he met a seven-year-old boy who had been hacked on the back of his neck with a machete and left for dead. His father had been killed. His sisters had both been killed. And his mother had been maimed the Fulani militia attackers. And it’s just one of those moments where gravity of what’s happening hits you and the utter inhumanity, which is happening mostly in the darkness. There’s not a lot of international attention on this violence, as horrific as it is.

Abi McDougal (21:00)

And I think our project manager also was sharing that during that week he was there, there was an attack by these Fulani militants every single night, right? They would come in the middle of the night and attack a different village. And it was this almost predictable, just consistent violence happening throughout the area.

Joel Veldkamp (21:21)

That’s right. The one on Palm Sunday was the biggest by far, but every day for about two weeks someone was being killed somewhere in that part of Plateau State in Nigeria. And it’s not a coincidence that this happened on Palm Sunday. These attacks tend to at holiday times, Christian holiday times. Before this massacre on Palm Sunday, the biggest recent massacre of Christians in Plateau State was on Christmas in 2023. And it was on Pentecost in 2022 that a Catholic church was attacked during Pentecost mass deep in the south of Nigeria in a place called Owo State, which is really shocking because this area is normally quite safe for Christians. It’s quite far from the violent zones that we’ve been discussing today, Abi. But so this is another indication that, you know, some people who tried to talk about this violence will say, this is a conflict between herders and farmers over resources, or this is a conflict that’s really driven by climate change. And those things are not completely wrong, but there is an ideology behind this violence, and there is a division along religious grounds that’s driving this violence. And you’re not going to understand what’s happening in Nigeria unless you understand that.

That the goal of these Fulani militia networks is to wipe out the Christian presence in the Middle Belt of Nigeria.

Abi McDougal (22:49)

That is very sobering. And you talked about CSI’s project manager visiting the hospital while these attacks were happening. Can you tell us what CSI has been doing to support and to help the communities directly affected by this?

Joel Veldkamp (23:04)

Yeah, so we’re very blessed to be able to partner with local Nigerian organizations in Northeast Nigeria, in Maiduguri, also in Plateau State, also in several other parts of the country. So when huge massacres like this happen, our partners are already there and they’re already equipped to respond. So after the July massacres, after the Palm Sunday massacre,

Our partners were able to get food aid to these people, also help rebuilding some of their homes in the event that it was safe to go back to their village. Medical aid, basic things like this, we were able to respond very, very quickly in the aftermath of these massacres. This little seven-year-old boy I mentioned, Stephen, we were able to help him and his mother find housing and help Stephen go to school again even though his father had been killed and they’d lost a lot of their income. So we’re grateful that we are in a position to help and that if Christians in the United States or in other countries want to support Nigerian Christians who are being targeted for their faith, they can do that through CSI.

Abi McDougal (24:11)

Yeah, and so what has the international response been to this

Joel Veldkamp (24:17)

So it’s really interesting. We’ve spoken about the threat from Boko Haram in the Northeast, this international jihadist terrorist network, and then the conflict in the Middle Belt, where you have Fulani militia groups attacking Christian villages and driving the Christian population out of the region. The international response to Boko Haram was quite sustained, was quite rigorous, at least 10 years ago, I would say.

US troops actually in the region helping the Nigerian government. If not to fight Boko Haram directly, then to find them, to find where they were hiding, help with intelligence, with targeting. And this was a major issue of international concern, precisely because Boko Haram posed an international threat. The Fulani militias attacking Christians in the Middle Belt haven’t threatened Western interests. They haven’t threatened to carry out attacks outside of Nigeria.

They aren’t, as far as we know, connected to international terrorism networks. So there, the international response has basically been zero. And you can even follow the allocation of United Nations funding for displaced people, for example. In northeast Nigeria, it’s quite substantial. There has been a substantial international response to help the displaced people. In the Middle Belt, where millions of people are displaced, literally millions.

very, very little has been done to help these people. So that’s quite telling. And that should, as we pray for persecuted Christians, we try to advocate for them, that should inform how we think about these issues. That often the international community will respond to things that it finds threatening, but when it’s just Christians being killed, there’s not that much interest, to be honest.

Abi McDougal (26:02)

So there is in the US, this designation of the US State Department will set out this list of countries of particular concern. And Nigeria has been on that list and off that list. Can you talk about what’s happening with that status in recent years and what’s happening now?

Joel Veldkamp (26:24)

Sure, so this status doesn’t have a lot of practical effect, we can say. It’s really just kind of a black mark on a country’s record if they get this CPC designation from the State Department that this country home to severe violations of religious freedom. as we’ve said, is the deadliest place in the world to be a Christian. It seems like kind of a no-brainer candidate for this list.

But it was not on the list until the first Trump administration. The first Trump administration took the decision to put Nigeria on this list of countries of particular concern, CPC. And this was a big deal in Nigeria. Nigerians are very culturally linked to the US. They follow US news. They follow American culture, media.

The US has a lot of cultural influence on Nigeria, we can say.

what the United States says is heard in Nigeria. So, and even when the Nigerian president came to Washington DC to visit President Trump in the White House, President Trump said to him, when are you going to stop killing Christians? Which is really shocking to the Nigerian president and to the Nigerian political scene. It had an impact.

During the Biden administration, this designation of CPC was removed almost immediately. And we know that this was at the request of the Nigerian president. He made this request to the American secretary of state. And then when he got that request, he went home and bragged to his supporters, look what I was able to get from the Americans. So I would say the thrust of American policy here is to maintain a good relationship with the Nigerian government no matter what, to keep China out of the region. And if thousands of Christians are being killed every year, that’s very sad, but it’s not really a top concern. What we’re interested in is seeing if President Trump might be willing to make the CPC designation again, might be willing to engage for Nigerian Christians again. ⁓ If you follow American politics, you may have noticed the president is a bit of a wild card.

He doesn’t always follow the script that he was handed when he entered the Oval Office.

Abi McDougal (28:36)

Ha

Joel Veldkamp (28:40)

He doesn’t always do the expected thing.

So we think this is a good time to press for Nigeria to be redesignated as a country of particular concern for religious freedom.

Abi McDougal (28:50)

then what needs to happen now for the Christians of Nigeria to start to move towards a safer future? What needs to happen from Western governments and what needs to happen in Nigeria itself?

Joel Veldkamp (29:06)

Yeah, Western governments need to take this issue more seriously. I think once they do, once the Nigerian government can see that this is a topic of actual concern to the United States, to the United Kingdom, especially, probably Nigeria’s two closest Western allies, we might start to see some changes in how seriously this issue is taken within the Nigerian government itself.

There are people inside the Nigerian security establishment who are benefiting from this violence, whose political positions will be enhanced if the Fulani militias succeed in driving the Christians out of the Middle Belt, or at least have positioned themselves as someone who can be valuable to the government because they fingers on this violence. So.

There is more that the Nigerian government can do if it’s properly motivated. And that motivation can best come from the United States and the United Kingdom, we believe. As for Christians around the world who care about Nigeria, who want to help their brothers and sisters in Nigeria, I think the best thing that we can do right now is just to engage. You can engage through CSI.

There are many other organizations, Christian organizations that are working in Nigeria. There are many strong denominations in Nigeria, many of which have connections to churches in North America or in Europe. There are many channels available to us to engage with our brothers and sisters in Nigeria to keep track of what’s happening to them, to talk about it.

this kind of engagement, I think, could really make a difference over the course of the coming decades, right? This is not gonna be fixed next year or in two years. But if Nigeria becomes a country that’s more recognizable to Christians in the US, in Europe, that’s more familiar, that we’re closer to emotionally, spiritually, I think we could have a big impact.

Abi McDougal (30:56)

Yeah, that’s a great word to end on. And at CSI, we keep praying and working to help Christians around the world stand with the body of Christ. And it’s so important to get to hear about what’s happening and to be able to honor their examples of faith and faithfulness to the gospel, even in the midst of so much suffering.

Joel Veldkamp (31:19)

Abi, we’ve covered a lot of ground in this episode. Also in our other episodes, we’ve covered a lot of history, a lot of geography. And if you have any questions about this, if this has sparked any any wonderings or further questions, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you. Drop us a comment. Send us an email. We might even read your question on the next episode.

Abi McDougal (31:41)

Thank you so much, Joel. That’s all for this episode. To learn more, visit csi-int.org, where you can read about our work supporting Christians in Nigeria. You can also find out more about our advocacy and our work directly on the ground, providing aid to support Christians facing persecution all around the world. If you have comments or questions, we’d love to hear from you. You can comment directly on your listening platform or contact us through our website

If this episode is encouraging, convicting, or eye-opening, be sure to share it with a friend and hit subscribe so that you can get updates I’m Abi McDougal and this is the Christian Solidarity Podcast. Thanks for listening.