Nigeria, "Christian Genocide" and the Right Wing Attempt To Create More War

Addressing the MAGA claim that Christians are suffering genocide in Nigeria

You may have heard an increasing claim from Trump and MAGAs about “Christian genocide” in Nigeria. If you haven’t yet, you will soon. Every few months, the same right-wing politicians and pundits who mock Black Christians killed by police, and celebrate Latino Christians being arrested, detained, and deported by ICE, suddenly pretend to care deeply about Christians in Africa.

Donald Trump, right wing evangelicals, even alleged Democratic pundits like Bill Maher, now claim Christians in Nigeria are suffering genocide. Meanwhile, Nigerian scholars—Christian and Muslim alike—are making clear that the violence in Nigeria is political and indiscriminate, not religious and targeted. Moreover, they’re standing united against the extremist factions who are killing both Christians and Muslims alike. No one wins with disinformation—except those looking to create more hate and war. In this article I cite trusted sources and verifiable scholars on Nigeria to break down what actually is happening. Let’s Address This.

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What’s Actually Happening in Nigeria (And What’s Not)

Nigeria is a complex nation with more than 200 million people, 250 different ethnic groups, diverse religious traditions, and deep political tensions. The nation’s population is approximately 56% Muslim, 43% Christian, and less than 1% other faith traditions. According to Pew, Nigeria has the world’s 5th largest Muslim population and 6th largest Christian population—making it the only nation on Earth with top 10 populations of both of the world’s major religions.

With this vast diversity, reducing all violence in Nigeria to “Muslims killing Christians” is not only ignorant—it’s factually wrong and actively harmful. Instead, here are the facts, grounded in credible reporting from Nigerian scholars.

1. Over 95% of violence in Nigeria is driven by political and economic conflict—not religion.

Nigeria’s violence is rooted in competition over land, elections, corruption, resource extraction, economic instability, and ethnic fragmentation. Every major Nigerian security expert says the same thing: this is political violence, not a holy war. A recent analysis by The Conversation adds:

Violent conflicts between these groups of people are driven by poor governance, inequality, historical grievances and environmental injustice–and it would be inaccurate to suggest they are entirely motivated by religion. They are best understood as eco-violence. The two groups clash over access to and control of water points and land, which leads to mass killings and the destruction of settlements. The Trump administration’s grouping of Nigeria’s violence together under the label of Islamist extremism is thus misleading.

2. Less than 5% of attacks have any claimed religious dimension.

And even those claims are often politically manipulated. Militant groups including Boko Haram—some criminal, some extremist, some political—frequently frame attacks in whatever language will inflame tensions and gain attention. The media does the rest. As Nigerian scholar Gimba Kakanda, who serves as Senior Special Assistant to the President of Nigeria on Research and Analytics in the Office of the Vice President, recently wrote:

In recent days, coordinated attacks on Nigeria’s nationhood have swept across social media, blogs and television outlets, alleging a so-called “Christian genocide”. These attacks, driven by foreign actors, mischaracterise Nigeria’s domestic conflicts, ignore its complexities and manipulate longstanding ethnic and resource-based tensions to advance sectarian agendas. While Christians have undeniably suffered horrific attacks, incidents of explicitly religious violence constitute only a fraction of Nigeria’s homicides, and direct interfaith confrontations are relatively rare. Framing Nigeria’s violence as Muslims killing Christians grossly misrepresents the situation. Worse still, some outside groups have published inflated statistics of Christian deaths without credible methodology, often counting every victim in certain regions as Christian by default or conflating deaths regardless of motive. Such dubious claims, pushed by the likes of Bill Maher, obscure the truth and trivialise the complexity of Nigeria’s conflicts.

3. More Muslims have been killed than Christians.

This is one of the most important facts consistently erased by U.S. propagandists. Northern Nigeria—majority Muslim—has endured the majority of mass killings. But you would never know it if you listened to right wing provocateurs. Again, to quote scholarship and research by Gimba Kakanda:

The real danger lies in media outlets portraying Boko Haram, a group despised by both Muslims and Christians, as representative of Islam. Boko Haram, along with ISWAP and bandit groups, treat anyone who opposes them as an enemy, regardless of faith. They have bombed mosques, assassinated Muslim leaders and killed Christians, demonstrating their indiscriminate violence. To characterise this as a strictly anti-Christian campaign is propaganda.

4. Nigerian Muslims and Christians are united against the violence.

Across Nigeria, religious leaders routinely issue joint statements condemning attacks. Nigerian Christian and Muslim leaders are actively working together to combat violence and extremism in Nigeria—and to further demonstrate that Christians and Muslims are united against that extremism no matter who it targets. Interfaith coalitions work daily on conflict prevention and community protection. Nigerians understand what the American right refuses to accept: their fight is political, not religious. Thus, refuting Trump’s claim of “Christian genocide,” Nigerian Minister of Information and National Orientation Mohammed Idris Malagi declared just last week:

Nigeria has a history of violent extremism that has created tension for us in the country, but I also want to point out that mostly they don’t discriminate between who is a Muslim or who is a Christian. Christian communities and Muslim communities have been attacked by these extremists. [He added that] claims Christians are being specifically targeted reflect a “lack of proper understanding of the diversity and complexity of the situation that we have in Nigeria”.

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5. The claim that “100,000 Christians have been killed” is false—and admitted to be false by its own source.

Finally, this number originates from a group called InterSociety, which admitted to the BBC that they cannot verify their estimate and lack evidence for their claims:

InterSociety did not share an itemised list of sources, making it hard to verify the total number of deaths it reports. In response to this criticism, the organisation has said that “it is almost impossible to reproduce all our reports and their references dating back to 2010. Our easy method is to pick their summary statistics and add them to our fresh discoveries or findings to make up our new reports.” But the data sources quoted by InterSociety in its reports do not reflect the figures published.

If it’s impossible to reproduce the data you claim is accurate, then that is an admission that the data you claim is fabricated. Instead, as reported by the BBC,

Nigerian security analyst Christian Ani said that while Christians had been attacked as part of a broader strategy of creating terror, it was not possible to justify claims that Christians were deliberately being targeted.

The BBC also reached out to Bill Maher for repeating the claim of “100,000 Nigerians killed,” and he refused to provide his source. Yet this unverified number is repeated as gospel by American propagandists because it fuels their agenda. When you have to fabricate body counts to push your narrative, it’s propaganda—not concern for human life. (Contrast this with the ample and detailed analysis documenting the individual names and family lineages of the victims of Israel’s genocide in Palestine).

Why the U.S. Right Is Pushing This Lie

The same people shouting about “targeted Christian persecution in Nigeria” are:

• silent about the genocide of Palestinian Christians
• silent about Christian churches bombed in Gaza
• silent about ICE torturing Latino Christians in U.S. detention
• silent when Black Christians in America are murdered by police
• silent when Christian refugees are banned from entering the U.S.

This isn’t compassion. It’s opportunistic bigotry. It’s white supremacy and further erasure of Black and brown people—including erasing Nigerian Christian scholars who are rebuking propagandized claims of “Christian genocide” in Nigeria.

They are weaponizing Nigerian suffering to advance Islamophobic narratives, justify U.S. militarism, and pit religious communities against one another—at home and abroad. This is the same tactic used after 9/11, during the Iraq War, and now in the genocide in Gaza. It is classic “divide and conquer.” It’s probably just a coincidence that Nigeria has the second largest proven oil reserves in Africa and the 10th largest globally. Not that the United States has ever before gone to war or destabilized a foreign nation over oil. (heavy satire).

Conclusion

Just as there is no evidence of “white genocide” of people in South Africa, there is no evidence of “Christian genocide” in Nigeria. Ironic, meanwhile, that while fabricating two genocides, the U.S. Government funds the very real and devastating genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. It is unsurprising, however, that even while fabricating claims of Christian genocide in Nigeria, Donald Trump is not laying out the red carpet for mass Nigerian migration to the United States, as he happily did for white farmers in South Africa. I’m not qwhite sure why he has a double standard here?

What’s happening right now is not a debate about Nigeria—it’s a test of whether we choose truth over propaganda. Nigerian scholars, analysts, and community leaders—Christian and Muslim alike—have been unequivocal: the violence devastating their nation is political, economic, and structural—not a religious war. Christians and Muslims in Nigeria know this. They are working together, organizing together, grieving together, and fighting for peace together. This includes Christians and Muslims in the highest offices of Nigerian government, working together to end violence in Nigeria.

It is only here, thousands of miles away, that bad-faith actors insist on rewriting their struggle into a clash of civilizations. And they are doing it for one reason—to manufacture fear, intensify Islamophobia, justify foreign intervention, and distract from the very real crises of violence and inequality in our own country. They don’t care about Nigerian Christians. They don’t care about Nigerian Muslims. They care about sustaining a narrative that keeps people divided and keeps them in power.

We cannot let them succeed.

If we are serious about justice—globally and domestically—we must resist these lies with evidence, amplify the voices of Nigerians actually living this reality, and stand united against the hate merchants who profit from discord. Do not let provocateurs manipulate your compassion. Do not let them turn human suffering into a political weapon. The truth matters. Solidarity matters. And the people of Nigeria deserve better than the propaganda being manufactured in their name.

Let's Address This with Qasim Rashid is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.