About Christian Persecution in Nigeria
Sadly, Nigeria has become known as the world’s center of Christian martyrs. In any given year, the number of Christians killed by extremist groups is rarely less than 4,000—often more than in the rest of the world combined.
Violence against the Nigerian Christian population is significantly localized in the north, where twelve Muslim-majority states declared sharia law in 1999, resulting in huge numbers of Christians experiencing daily discrimination. But it was the rise of an extremist movement called Boko Haram, which first started its murderous attacks in 2009, that resulted in Christians experiencing unprecedented violence.
According to an April 2023 report by the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, at least 52,250 persecuted Christians have been killed in the past fourteen years, simply for the crime of being Christian. In the past five years, violence has spread southwards to the middle belt of Nigeria, with radicalized Fulani herdsmen killing Christians to steal their land.
Boko Haram has now been joined by another extremist group operative in the area, called the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), and both seek the eradication of Christianity from the northern states.
The violence has resulted in refugees now numbering over four million, mostly Christian farmers. The government of Nigeria has proved unwilling to condemn the levels of violence, which some call genocidal, or inept in its attempts to engage and neutralize extremist movements.
Rising Death Toll of Christians in Nigeria
Death Toll: The death toll among Christians killed in Nigeria has been staggering. With more than 50,000 Christians killed, Central Nigeria has seen an increase in attacks, spreading beyond the northern regions. The Christian community faces relentless violence from extremist groups that target them for their faith. The central government’s failure to counteract this violence continues to fuel the crisis.
Tensions Between Christians and Muslims
Parts of Nigeria: In parts of Nigeria, particularly in the north, tensions between Christians and Muslims have escalated due to extremist activity. Christian persecution has worsened as groups like Boko Haram and ISWAP wage campaigns of terror against Christian communities.
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History of Christian Persecution in Nigeria
For example, the northern eastern state of Borno is about 20% Christian. Inevitably Christianity arrived in the country when traders from the Portuguese first arrived in the fifteenth century to find slaves, although Catholic priests later tried to outlaw the trade when they arrived in greater numbers in the seventeenth century.
Remarkably, when slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833, many freed slaves became Christians and returned to Nigeria to preach the Gospel. Samuel Ajayi Crowther was the first African to be ordained Bishop by the Protestant Christian Missionary Society and went to translate much of the Bible into the Yoruba language in the mid-1880s.
Christianity doubled in size to form more than half the population in the latter half of the 20th century and is projected to continue to grow—mainly due to demographic reasons—and become in 2050 the country with the third largest Christian population in the world, with 211 million believers.
