52,000 Christians Slaughtered and Counting
In Nigeria, where the population is split nearly evenly between Muslims and Christians, it has become an almost everyday occurrence for militants and nomadic herders to descend on Christian villages, cut down entire families with bullets and machetes, set churches ablaze, and kidnap women and children.
Since 2009, at least 52,000 Christians have been slaughtered—with over 7,000 deaths in 2025 alone. Tens of thousands have been abducted. Millions have been driven from their ancestral homes, where they have farmed for generations, and into dangerous, dirty camps rife with sexual violence. It is estimated that nearly 20,000 churches have burned to the ground.
The world has been slow to recognize the accelerating genocide against Nigerian Christians over the last decade and a half, but the anguished cries and the burned, blood-soaked villages are becoming harder to ignore.
The legacy media tend to ignore the plight of Christians in Nigeria. When outlets do begrudgingly report on the most shocking attacks, they misleadingly frame the conflict as being primarily over scarce resources like land—and even a result of climate change. An absurd 2024 United Nations report, for example, avoids using the word “Christian” and attributes the murders entirely to climate change and ethnic conflict. The kicker is a self-pitying quote from a man representing a group of nomadic herdsmen who have been implicated in much of the violence: “Climate change is a new challenge that we didn’t experience 20 or 30 years ago; it’s really impacting us.”
Legacy media outlets, government agencies, and NGOs, chock-full of secular, Ivy League-educated progressives, will bend over backward to avoid confronting the fact that religion is at the heart of the violence. They will say, for example, that violence affects many groups in Nigeria, not just Christians. While it is true that innocent Muslims have also been victims at the hands of Islamist terrorist organizations, it is just not the case that Christian groups are inflicting violence upon Muslims. And even when Muslim groups are not targeting Christians specifically for their faith, they are doing so to drive them out and claim their land.
Nigerian Christians are most at threat from Islamic terrorist groups like Boko Haram, which came to global prominence in 2013 for kidnapping 276 predominantly Christian schoolgirls, and Fulani herders, many of whom have become radicalized. The Fulani, the first ethnic group to convert to Islam in Africa, are spread throughout the continent. In Nigeria, many are pastoralists who live a nomadic lifestyle raising cattle. The Fulani have been pushing south into historically Christian areas with increasing frequency and aggression in recent years to engage in banditry and confiscate land.
Rev. Fr. Remigius Ihyula, the director of the Catholic Diocese of Makurdi’s Justice, Peace and Development Foundation, said, “These Fulani militias are not just killing—they’re clearing land to claim it. And they’re being allowed to do it.”
Recent attacks help illustrate the barbarity, but only begin to tell a horror story that has been unfolding over decades. On Sept. 19, Catholic priest Mathew Eya was executed after militants on motorcycles shot out his car’s tires—and then turned their guns on him. Eya is one of over 500 clergy killed for their faith since 2015. In 2025, the violence has continued to escalate. In early August, cattle rustlers targeted a series of Christian farming villages, reportedly in retaliation for the theft of cattle, killing nine. On July 15, Muslim militants killed 27 Christians in a moonlit raid, some of whom, including a three-year-old girl, were burned alive in their homes. On June 13, 40 armed jihadists executed more than 200 Christians in the predominantly Catholic village of Yelwata.
According to the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law, a Nigerian Catholic nonprofit, roughly 30 Christians are murdered in the country every day. Open Doors International, a nonprofit that tracks persecution against Christians, ranks Nigeria as the eighth most dangerous country in the world for Christians, and the one with the highest number of absolute deaths. To be a Christian in Nigeria is to live with a target on your back.
How did it come to this—and why aren’t more people talking about it?
As is so often the case, to make sense of the present moment, it is necessary to understand the past.
Before the British took control of what is now called Nigeria, the northern regions were part of the Sokoto Caliphate, one of history’s most powerful Islamic empires. At the turn of the 20th century, British colonial forces, which already controlled the southern regions, defeated the caliphate’s supreme ruler, and formally took control of Nigeria. Although the Sokoto Caliphate ceased to exist, the British allowed local emirs to continue ruling on its behalf.
The emirs, in keeping with traditional Muslim precepts, continued to forbid Christian evangelism. Meanwhile, Christian missionaries flocked to the south and, over time, evangelized large swathes of the region.
Nigeria officially gained independence from Britain in 1960 and became a democracy in 1999 following decades of rule by military despots. Today, Nigeria is home to Africa’s second-largest Christian population, around 100 million, and the vast majority of them live in the south. The north, in contrast, remains heavily Muslim. In a dozen northern states, governments have explicitly instituted Sharia law, and militant groups have seen in the Sokoto Caliphate a blueprint for the country’s future. The country has no official state religion, but it is a member of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which describes itself as “The Collective Voice of the Muslim World.”
It is in central Nigeria, in a broad strip of the country running east to west called the Middle Belt, where the lines between the country’s Muslim- and Christian-dominated regions blur and merge, and the persecution of Christians is most acute.
A longstanding complaint among Nigerian Christians is that the federal government has barely lifted a finger to combat the terrorism that afflicts so many in their communities. Officials in Nigeria’s federal government deny that Christians are being targeted for their religion, and they play down the number of deaths. But these denials are unsurprising when you consider that President Bola Tinubu and Vice President Kashim Shettima are both Muslims.
The government’s apparent passivity in the face of widespread massacres suggests callous indifference, at best, and complicity, at worst.
What can be done?
In 2021, the Biden administration, for unknown reasons, removed Nigeria from its list of countries that routinely violate religious freedom, known as Countries of Particular Concern. The Trump administration has yet to restore Nigeria’s place on that list, where it rightfully belongs. The public must demand that the Trump administration take this step, at a minimum.
Momentum does seem to be building. In September, Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R) introduced the Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act of 2025, which would, among other provisions, target with sanctions any Nigerian officials who encourage, promote, or assist in the murder of Christians. Even Bill Maher, a staunch atheist who has a history of antagonizing Christians, used his platform on HBO in late September to bring attention to the genocide.
Prayer is the single most important action Christians in America and the rest of the world can take at this moment. But actions must follow prayer, and what Nigerian Christians need is for Americans and people around the world to demand an end to the genocide..
Call your representatives, post on social media, submit letters and op-eds to your local paper, talk to your friends, families, and neighbors.
Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel wrote: “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.” Those words are affixed within the halls of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, reminding us that silence and inaction are complicity. For the sake of Nigeria’s Christians, may Wiesel’s call be ours.