(LifeSiteNews) — Christians and minority Muslim groups continue to be persecuted in Nigeria as religious freedom concerns remain.
New findings published by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) highlight the state-sponsored promulgation of religious persecution in the nation, with 12 state governments, along with the national government, enforcing blasphemy laws.
“Nigerian government’s enforcement of blasphemy laws and an increase in violent attacks by nonstate entities targeting religious communities constitute significant restrictions on freedom of religion or belief,” the USCIRF wrote.
Nigeria has consistently emerged as one of the most dangerous countries on earth to practice Christianity. The 2025 Global Christian Relief (GCR) Red List report named Nigeria as the most dangerous region for Christians in the world. Some 8,000 Christians were killed in 2023 by Islamic militants, and over 50,000 Christians have been killed since 2009.
“No nation watches her citizens slaughtered like animals and says there is nothing to be done. It’s genocide,” Bishop Wilfred Chikpa Anagbe – of the Nigerian Diocese of Makurdi – said earlier this year. He, as the USCIRF noted, subsequently received threats against him for giving the testimony.
Anti-Christian attacks are particularly prevalent in Nigeria’s central region, wrote the USCIRF, where Muslim herders attack Christian farmers. Hundreds of Christians have been killed there this year alone, with 200 Christians killed in one recent attack in mid-June.
The Catholic Church in particular has become a target of Islamic attacks, with increasing reports emerging of priests and seminarians being abducted for ransom, and sometimes executed:
Bandit groups in Nigeria often carry out kidnappings to extort ransom money, and they have increasingly targeted religious institutions that they believe have substantial financial means. The Catholic Church and its clergy often become targets, impacting diocese operations and the larger Christian community.
Watchdog group Open Doors wrote in its report that Nigeria saw 3,100 killed in 2024, out of the total global total of 4,476 Christians. Meanwhile the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law reported in spring 2023 that over 50,000 have been killed in the country for their Christian faith since 2009. That figure was greatly accelerated in the latter years of the report.
In addition to the growing death toll, the accompanying number of families forced to flee their homes after such attacks is greater still. Open Doors described Nigeria as an “epicenter” for displacement of Christians, as thousands are forced to flee from their homes. Open Doors reported that “almost half” of the global total of 210,000 displaced Christians are from Nigeria, a country listed as the seventh most dangerous in the organization’s list of the top 50 most dangerous countries to be a Christian.
This displacement, reported the USCIRF, is not helped by the fact that “inadequate resources continue to hamper the government’s ability to prevent the recent surge in violence across the country. Local police and army units frequently do not have the manpower that violent groups employ.”
“Nigeria has the capacity to handle this. It’s just the will that is not there,” Bishop Anagbe told ACI Africa recently.
International Christian aid organization Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) has also long highlighted the plight of persecuted Christians in the country, writing that Nigeria is home to more persecution “than anywhere else in the world.”
Addressing an ACN conference in Scotland earlier this year, Anagbe added that “this terror is faith based and intended to to force Christian’s into forced submission and conversion.” “The Nigerian government,” he added, “has never done enough to protect Christian communities.”
The reluctance to act at the national level was also highlighted by the USCIRF, which though influential is not an official U.S. governmental agency. “The Nigerian government remains slow or, at times, appears unwilling to respond to this violence, creating an environment of impunity for the attackers,” the group wrote.
The USCIRF has already urged the U.S. government to designate Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” and this is a call that is certainly not new: the Biden administration came under fire for refusing to add Nigeria to the list of such countries, despite the widespread persecution documented.
Bishop Jude Arogundade of the southwestern Nigerian Diocese of Ondo lamented in late 2022 that “whenever the [U.S.] Democrats are in power they look away from the killings of Christians in Nigeria. It was very visible during Obama’s administration.”
It remains to be seen what response the Trump administration will levy to the USCIRF’s latest report and recommendations regarding religious freedom in Nigeria.
