I have great news for President Trump!
He has expressed such outrage at attacks on Christians in Nigeria that he has threatened military intervention there, and the Pentagon has obligingly prepared plans for attack. Trump’s concern for Nigerians is welcome, but here’s the awkwardness: Trump’s aid cuts are killing far more Nigerian Christians than Islamic terrorists are.
So if Trump wants to save the lives of Nigerian Christians, the good news is that he doesn’t need to spend billions of dollars on charging (as he put it) “into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing.’” Rather, all Trump has to do is restore the American aid that was estimated to be saving the lives of more than a quarter-million Nigerians each year.
The president’s threat to attack Nigeria seemed a response to heated talk in certain circles lately about killings or even genocide of Christians in Nigeria. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has denounced “the mass murder of Christians” in Nigeria, and Bill Maher claimed that more than 100,000 Christians have been killed there since 2009.
“If you don’t know what’s going on in Nigeria, your media sources suck,” Maher said.
But Maher himself doesn’t seem to know what’s going on in Nigeria. Nor apparently does Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who announced that the Pentagon was “preparing for action” in Nigeria.
There have indeed been killings of Christians (and Muslims alike) in Nigeria by murderous jihadi groups like Boko Haram and Islamic State. More broadly, insecurity is an immense problem in Nigeria, with 8,000 civilians of all faiths killed so far this year. It’s also true that several northern Nigerian states have blasphemy laws that can be used to terrorize Christians or nonobservant Muslims.
Trump’s attention to all these problems would be most welcome. But to call the situation a genocide is to mock the victims of actual genocides.
Right-wing claims of tens of thousands of deaths of Christians appear far off the mark. Rigorous reporting by Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, an independent monitoring group, says that there have been 33 deaths so far this year in attacks against Christians in which religion was reported to play a role. The equivalent figure for Muslims is higher, 88 deaths.
Since January 2020, the data initiative counts 475 people killed in attacks targeting Christians, and 404 deaths in attacks targeting Muslims.
It is possible that these figures significantly understate the totals, because it’s often unclear whether a victim’s religion was a factor in the killing. Some killings involve Muslim Fulani herders who have conflicts with settled Christian farmers. It’s difficult to know when such a killing is rooted in religion or when it’s a dispute about a herder’s cow eating a farmer’s crop.
It’s also not clear whether Muslims or Christians are suffering more casualties. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom said in its report last year that “violence affects large numbers of Christians and Muslims” alike.
Another reason to be skeptical of claims of a genocide against Christians in Nigeria is that many top Nigerian officials are Christian, and the first lady is not only a Christian but also a pastor.
In any case, the number of killings in Nigeria — while tragic — pales beside the 400,000 people believed to have died in Sudan’s civil war over the last two and a half years. If Trump cares about atrocities in Africa, he should call up his friends and business partners in the United Arab Emirates and ask that country to stop financing the Rapid Support Forces militia responsible for mass murder and mass rape in Sudan.
There’s something else that I find offensive about the Trump/Hegseth bombast about Nigeria: If you care about religious repression of only your sect, you don’t really care about religious repression. Persecution of Christians, Muslims, Baha’is, Ahmadis and others is a global scourge and deserves more attention, but some of the most urgent cases today involve Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and Uyghur Muslims in China.
A radical theme of Jesus’ teachings, as the scholar Bart Ehrman notes in a forthcoming book, “Love Thy Stranger,” was his emphasis on empathy for all people, including strangers outside one’s circle. Some missionaries, nuns and aid workers live that principle; one such heroic figure, a missionary aid worker named Kevin Rideout, was recently kidnapped in Niger, where for 19 years he had committed himself to improving the well-being of local people. But chest-beating about a nonexistent Christian genocide strikes me as puerile and performative.
My Times colleague Helene Cooper reported that in response to Trump’s threat, the United States military has drawn up options for intervening in Nigeria in three variations: light, medium and heavy. None seems likely to accomplish much except waste money — just as Trump’s forgotten campaign against Yemen in the spring squandered $1 billion in the first month alone and achieved nothing obvious.
Trump might also reflect that while jihadists have been unable to kill tens of thousands of Nigerian Christians, his own administration appears to be doing just that. The Center for Global Development in Washington calculated earlier this year that before Trump took office, American humanitarian aid was saving about 270,000 lives a year in Nigeria.
It’s too soon to predict confidently just how many Nigerian Christian children will die because Trump cut off their access to vaccines, AIDS medications, food assistance and other essentials. But the number killed by jihadists is very likely to pale beside the number dying from Trump aid cuts. So if Trump cares about Christians or anyone else in Nigeria, all he needs to do is restore aid and let babies live.
This article was first published in New York Times
