As chilling testimony was heard on Capitol Hill this month during a U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom panel about heinous acts being perpetrated against Christians in Nigeria, there seems to be a deafening silence on the widespread persecution that the West African country is enduring. The latest violence occurred over the weekend with 100 gunmen attacking a government school, abducting 70 students on June 19. Countless priests and seminaries have been killed or kidnapped within the last year. Since 2015, more than 2,000 churches have been destroyed and the country has witnessed a mass exodus of 4 to 5 million Christians who have fled the civil war-torn country. 

Eric Patterson, vice president at the Religious Freedom Institute, spoke with the Register offering gripping details on how the situation has spiraled into this catastrophic state, and why he says Christians in the country are facing expulsion unless something is done. 

 

Thank you for your time today, Eric, to shed light on some of the tragic stories coming out of Nigeria. We’re hearing about mass killings, kidnappings of Christians and other minorities — testimony that was heard on Capitol Hill this month about babies being “ripped from their mother’s womb” by Islamic terrorists. Now, the woman offering testimony was from the northeastern region of Nigeria. And I do understand that there are two factions at play here — Boko Haram more to the north and the dire situation in Nigeria’s middle belt, where you said last year that Christians are facing expulsion if no one came to their aid. What does the situation on the ground look like?

Thank you very much for having me here and for bearing witness to the attacks on actually almost every faith group in Nigeria, but in particular this slaughter of Christians, both in the north and in the middle belt of the country. And you’re exactly right, there is the terrorist group Boko Haram and an overlapping, distinct terrorist group. There’s an Islamic State group that’s in that part of the country in the north, the northeast, but they’ve perpetrated attacks throughout the country, both on fellow Muslims, Sunni Muslims and on Shia Muslims, and then against Christians, literally trying to exterminate the Christians from that area. 

In the middle belt, as you were just suggesting, this is a part of the country where the demographics are more evenly divided between Muslims and Christians. These groups are from different tribal groups, and, historically, part of what is going on is that there are differences between those who are cattle herders against farmers and village folk. But what we’ve seen is that this is not just about land or water. This has been the torching of churches, the beheading of Christians, the seeking out of Christians, and violating their bodies in the way that you just described in a very systematic way. And it has been going on for years now.

 

A recent report says more than 12,000 Christians in Nigeria have been killed in attacks since June of 2015. Some consider Boko Haram to be synonymous with ISIS. But they have a very different origin. Can you tell us about this terrorist group?

Boko Haram really started more as a localized movement, rather than a well-thought-out campaign. Its name means, essentially, “no to Western education.” So it began as a revisionist group that wanted to take society in the northern part of Nigeria, where they had instituted sharia [Islamic law] alongside civil law more than a decade ago. And they wanted to take it back to the 12th century of Islam and reject, essentially, all things Western; the values of the West democracy, the equality of men and women, Christian influences — that entire package being rejected for a 12th-century kind of feudal form of Islam. And they’ve now coalesced into a much larger organization. And they’ve been doing it through terror, intimidation, kidnappings, rape, slavery and murder.

 

Turning our attention to strictly Christian persecution — amid this widespread terrorism — as you were just discussing, Nigeria’s middle belt seems to be where we are seeing most of the deaths. The bloodshed seems to be at the hands of the Fulani. And I’m not sure if I’m correct on that, but can you tell us about the Fulani — who they are and how long they’ve had this stronghold? I believe the middle belt is where we are seeing so many reports of priests and seminarians being kidnapped, just remembering seminarian Michael Nnadi killed earlier this year.

That’s exactly right. So we often hear the term Hausa-Fulani, which are two distinct but intermarried Muslim predominant tribes that are among the biggest in all of Nigeria. Interestingly, over the past decade, a lot of people haven’t realized that although these two have often worked together, there has actually been Fulani-on-Hausa violence as well. But the Fulani is a large national group, tens of millions of people in the region. 

Sometimes in the West we say the word “tribe,” and we mean, you know, a very, very small group of people. But this is a national group. The current president of Nigeria is Fulani. So they have power; they have representation. This is not a small indigenous group that’s somehow hidden away in a corner of the country being mistreated. And what we’ve seen is, historically, rivalries between tribal groups, including ones that are Christians, but specifically in the middle belt, we have seen the radicalization of this. 

Instead of it simply being about land or water or growing populations that are butting heads, the spray painting of Allahu Akbar on churches — the burning of churches, the targeting of seminarians, the recent decapitation of priests, the attacks on missionaries, nuns, evangelists, pastors — that is religious violence directed specifically at Christians. And just this year, the reports are that at least 1,300 Christians had been killed in that region in Nigeria this year alone.

 

Considering this wave of terrorism we are seeing from these two factions taking hold in Nigeria, many consider religious freedom to be the precursor here, leading then to religious disagreement, but you have a very unique, different idea. You say it’s actually religious repression that leads to this type of aggression. Can you expound on that?

Yes, what typically happens is not that an opening towards democracy, human rights, respect for one’s neighbors, religious tolerance — that package of liberties — we don’t really have places in the world where, as a country becomes more like that, people start killing each other more [that leads to this]. It’s typically the opposite. It is when you have the breakdown of institutions, when you have politicians who will emphasize not what binds the country together — but by my tribe over that tribe, “I’m going to deliver for my people, not those people,” when leaders scapegoat the other. All of those are the types of things that heighten the cleavages that may already exist because of different tribal origins. And in Nigeria, that’s what we’re seeing. And when adults, when leaders, when religious leaders, such as clerics who support Boko Haram or give justification to these Fulani tribesmen in any of these cases, often, what they’re doing is they’re radicalizing the parts of the religion that justify “Oh, they’re an infidel; you can take them out.” “Oh, they’re a Western influence preaching Christianity; you can take them out.” “Oh, they’re women who can be slaves or sex slaves because they’re second-class citizens.” And so it’s a cycle of violent language and rhetoric. And when you train up a bunch of teenage boys, they become very, very violent.

 

Last year, Nigeria was listed by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as a country of “particular concern,” which brought the country under the same radar as some of the biggest religious-freedom violators like Iran and China. Given the nonstop uptick of violence we are seeing in Nigeria, was else can be done? Is the current administration taking the situation seriously?

It’s heartening that finally the U.S. Department of State took this step in December of 2020. To list Nigeria as a country of particular concern alongside, as you said, Iran and North Korea and others. But what is being done, I have to say, that it’s pretty disappointing that the current ambassador [Mary Beth Leonard] there has dismissed that there has any religious element to this and has said in a recent interview that these are just old grievances based on land and water rights. … If you don’t get the right diagnosis of a problem, then you can’t solve the problem. And not taking into account the way that there has been a radicalization of the violence along jihadist lines misses the types of things that are lurking in the background and what has made the conditions in Nigeria increasingly violent — that if there was not a religious dimension, then we wouldn’t have Boko Haram. 

If there wasn’t a religious dimension, we wouldn’t have the Islamic State in that area, and, of course, we wouldn’t have the targeting of churches and Christians. So much more needs to be done.

 

Earlier this year, Archbishop Augustine Obiora Akubeze, the president of the Nigerian bishops’ conference, said the attacks against Christians are really due to a lack of security in the entire country. Do you see it that way? 

I really don’t see it that way. And I think there’s a number of reasons for that. One is it sometimes feels like it’s just impossible to get our hands around this. The second is the U.S. has never really devoted enough time, attention and resources to Africa. Another is it seems like this administration is dragging its feet on these types of very, very real issues, really around the globe. 

It has been reluctant to call out religious-freedom violators of ethnoreligious violence in Burma, China and elsewhere. In other words, the religious dimensions — attacking people because of their ethnoreligious heritage or affiliation as a certain thing like the Uyghurs, like the Rohingya — the lack of an appointment of a U.S. ambassador for religious freedom, those things suggest that, at least early in the Biden administration, it is moving no faster than previous administrations; in fact, perhaps slower, in taking into account the deep religious cleavages that are causing violence in Nigeria. And just remember that half of the population of West Africa is in Nigeria. So out of 400 million people, 220 million or something like that are in Nigeria. So if it falls apart, that whole region goes down.

 

Given your wealth of wisdom on religious freedom and the grave situation on the ground, how can we as Catholics help those being persecuted in Nigeria? 

We can be praying for the Nigerian government—that prayer of goodwill that its leaders will have the capacity and the ability to stand up against these things… To pray that regional leaders in West Africa and international leaders will have creative solutions and the will to intervene in positive ways such as developing professional security forces in Nigeria that will help. We need to be praying about what we can do as believers to ameliorate suffering whether that's through giving or things there on the ground.

 

Alyssa Murphy is the Register’s managing editor of digital assets.