For years, Christians have been systemically persecuted in Nigeria, with Muslim terrorist groups and militias periodically raiding, raping, murdering, and enslaving Christian civilians in the northern part of the country.
According to a recent article in Catholic Vote, “[F]rom 2019 to 2023, a total of 55,910 people were killed,” and “21,621 people were abducted.” During this four-year timespan, Nigeria “saw an average of eight attacks per day involving killings and/or abductions.” This has continued to this day, with “more than 7,000 Christians killed in Nigeria during the first 220 days of 2025.”
Yet Christian leaders continue to bury their heads in the sand about this crisis. In a recent speech, Pope Leo XIV carried on the unimpressive legacy of his predecessor by directing his righteous ire on Western nations being too inhospitable to immigrants: “With the abuse of vulnerable migrants, we are witnessing, not the legitimate exercise of national sovereignty, but rather grave crimes committed or tolerated by the state.”
In all likelihood, the pope doesn’t realize the horrors of Muslim aggression because of the way it’s reported. This is shown in the excuses of Cardinal Parolin, once a serious competitor for the papacy, who denies that there is any kind of persecution happening. According to him, the current situation in Nigeria is “not a religious conflict, but rather more a social one, for example, disputes between herders and farmers.” As evidence, he claims that “many Muslims in Nigeria are themselves victims of this same intolerance.”
Besides the fact that Christian victims far outnumber Muslim ones, this specious reasoning utterly neglects that the aggressors and their enablers in the Nigerian government are Muslim. According to Judd Saul, a missionary documenting the attacks, these terrorists “have declared that Allah has given Nigeria to them and that they can do with Nigeria whatever they want, and once they have the political cover in these northern states, they start going after more land and more villages and start doing the killings.”
This statement was affirmed by fellow Christian filmmaker Mike Arnold, who explained that the attackers will “separate Christian and Muslim men and women first. [And then] they kill the Christian men and tell the Muslim men that they must either join them or die, and they kill all the ones who don’t join them and sell the women into sex slavery.” Meanwhile, Nigerian government officials will keep repeating the line that this is a territorial scuffle “between herders and farmers,” as though this somehow makes it OK and not requiring of attention.
Even leftist comedian Bill Maher pointed out this problem of Christian persecution on his show last month. And President Trump, who has long known about it, is now receiving petitions to call out this violence and again designate Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern,” as he did in his first term.
So why do Christians and other secular leaders refuse to acknowledge the truth about this? Probably because doing so would mean acknowledging a deeper truth that Christianity and Islam are fundamentally different faiths, that the modern ecumenical project of finding common ground has failed, and that importing third-worlders by the millions is civilizational suicide.
Outside of being both monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam have almost nothing else in common. Christianity was founded by a Jewish carpenter who preached about God’s self-sacrificial love, called His would-be followers to repent, and was crucified and raised from the dead. Islam was founded by an Arabian warlord who forced mass conversion (or subservience) to his religion through violent conquest. As such, Christianity imposes a challenging moral code based on the tenets of God’s sacrificial love, while Islamic morality imposes a much lighter moral code where any action is more or less permitted if it’s done in the name of spreading Islam.
This difference has resulted in very different cultures and societies. As I have argued in a previous essay, Muslim-majority countries do not share the West’s liberal values and often suffer from political corruption, economic inequality, and general instability as a result. As a rule, they are often poor, violent, and tribalistic. Thus, when Christians and Westerners show maximum tolerance and seek rapprochement with Muslim communities, what they are accommodating is effectively a whole host of destructive social pathologies.
Rather than admit this, leftists have to pretend that the problems of the Muslim world must be due to other factors: European colonialism, Western chauvinism, or Christian farmers planting crops in the wrong spot. They will willfully ignore the abundant evidence of persecution and violence committed in the name of Allah. They will give a pass to authorities that passively enable this, yet regularly castigate the victims for daring to speak out about their own suffering. All this is clearly what is happening in Nigeria, which, at this rate, will soon become fully Muslim and regress into precolonial tribalism (think of the Nigerian classic Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe but in reverse).
And as they work themselves into a righteous fury, these same leftists will demand that Western nations take in ever more Muslim immigrants without complaint. Already, much of Western Europe — Spain, France, the U.K., Ireland, and Germany — has resigned itself to allowing Muslim migrants to settle in its cities and rejects cultural assimilation. This is also happening in many American cities that have inexplicably welcomed large groups of Syrian, Somali, and Gazan refugees without any objections.
Simply understanding this problem is key to solving it. In practical terms, this would mean publicly condemning Christian persecution when it happens and indeed designating countries such as Nigeria as “Countries of Particular Concern.” Additionally, it would mean ending taxpayer-funded entitlements to incoming Muslim immigrants, enforcing the law equally, and curtailing migration from the Muslim world.
As for Pope Leo and other leftist Christians who want to help Muslim immigrants and eliminate borders, they need to honestly reckon with the carnage, destruction, and exploitation that they’ve mindlessly helped to encourage. They don’t necessarily need to launch a new crusade, but neither do they need to apologize for crusades in the past — there is a good reason they happened. Rather, these pastors need to defend their flocks, come to terms with reality, and preach the Gospel for a change.
Read the full article here
