Since Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and rebranded it “X” in 2023, the social media platform has transformed from a once-reliable source of news to a playground for Russian and Chinese bots, and the largest disinformation hub for MAGA. 

However, it’s not entirely useless. If you want to know what the dubious Fox News talking point of next month will be, you’ll likely find it today developing in the primordial cesspool of X.

One case in point is the story of a “genocide” being committed against Christians in Nigeria. In June of this year, a video claiming to show an Islamic group attacking and killing Christians on a Muslim holy day began to make the rounds on X. Recently, the story has taken on legs and is appearing as stories raising the alarm about a genocide of Nigerian Christians.

Seeds of Truth

What isn’t in dispute is that terrorism and civil unrest have been common in Nigeria for decades, and religious communities often find themselves as targets. Recent years have shown an uptick in high-profile acts of violence against Christians.

In 2022, St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in the southern city of Owo was attacked, with gunmen killing dozens of worshippers. In 2023, over 30 people, mainly Christian villagers, were killed in Runji by local herdsmen.

More recently, a string of attacks occurred in central Nigeria over the summer. This culminated in a massacre of between 100 and 200 Christian villagers by jihadists in Yelwata, a farming community in the state of Benue. 

Witnesses reported to Genocide Watch, “Over 40 gunmen stormed the village on motorcycles in pairs, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ as they opened fire on civilians, moving from house to house, setting homes on fire, and killing indiscriminately.”

The U.S. State Department, under multiple presidential administrations, has criticized the Nigerian government for not doing enough to protect its vulnerable communities. A 2023 report on religious freedom cited a growing concern for the situation, with deaths from terrorism rising that year. According to the report, however, much of the violence was driven by ISIS and Boko Haram, two Islamic terrorist organizations that often target each other.

Even so, elevated violence against Christians in Nigeria is a growing concern.

Flowers of Complexity

However, as much as Western observers would like to frame the conflicts in Nigeria as a simple battle about religion, the truth is far more complicated.

Geographically, Nigeria is divided into three regions running from north to south. The northern region is mainly Muslim, and Christians make up most of the population in the south. The country’s “Middle Belt” is a transition zone, with Christian and Muslim populations living alongside each other. In this region, many Christians are farmers, and many Muslims tend to be herdsmen.

None of this geographic division is an accident of history, but a result of colonialism.

Under British indirect rule, the Northern Region was administered through Muslim emirates, and colonial policy typically restricted Christian missions—especially proselytizing among Muslims—there. This helped preserve the North’s already Muslim-majority population. Mission activity flourished in the rest of the country, contributing to predominantly Christian populations in the South and large Christian communities across the Middle Belt.

In the Middle Belt, however, missionary institutions and a religiously diverse population merged into a regional political movement that was framed as “Christian.” This nurtured a regional Christian identity that is more about politics than it is about religious practice. (Sound familiar?)

Historically, much of the violence in Nigeria has occurred involving jihadist factions in the north. (Although the infamous jihadist group Boko Haram attacks people indiscriminately, the vast majority of their victims are Muslim.) But conflicts around land and water rights and shifting environmental concerns in the Middle Belt have increased terrorism against Christian communities there.

The colonial enterprise created an enduring reality in which, especially in the Middle Belt, land and religion are inextricably linked. So, when there is violence against religious communities, is it about their land or their religion?

The answer is, of course, “yes,” “neither,” “both,” and “it’s complicated.”

Nigerian Christians under attack aren’t always targeted for their religion, although that is sometimes the case. And when they are, it can be as much about their historical place in society as it is about their Christian identity. So, under certain definitions of the term, a case can be made that an attempted genocide is occurring in Nigeria. But it may be a stretch to suggest it is a Christian genocide. 

Lingering Questions

It’s been said that “where you stand determines what you see.” So it is natural that environmental activists will look at the rising violence in Nigeria as being about the drastically evolving realities of climate change, and political observers will see tribal conflict. Christians will see religious persecution. None of them is entirely wrong. But they are all framing the story from a limited viewpoint.

From a faith perspective, there are two questions we can’t escape regarding the violence against Christians in Nigeria. The first is, are we telling the whole truth?

Some social media posts have claimed that over 100,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria since 2009. Data from Nigeria is historically inaccurate due to several factors, one of which is that Nigeria hasn’t measured religion or ethnicity in its census since 1963. Counts of religiously motivated attacks can be very unreliable, and the 100,000 number is the upper end of estimates.

Additionally, many social media posts imply that the (at least) tens of thousands of Nigerian Christians massacred have been relatively recent, including in the video from X that spread throughout the summer. Incidentally, many of the details of the video and its corresponding posts have proven to be falsified. The attack is real, but it is unclear who the victims were and on what day the incident occurred.

A deeper question, however, is why many Christians are only now expressing concern over what is happening in Nigeria, if the current events are merely an escalation of what has been happening for a long time? It’s hard to ignore the suspicion that the social media activity over religious-based violence in Nigeria is connected to the conflict in another region defined by colonial aggression—Gaza.

In late September, the comedian and political commentator Bill Maher blasted the U.S. media for not covering the situation in Nigeria, claiming it is “much more of a genocide attempt than what is going on in Gaza.” Maher cited the likely inflated statistics. Although Maher is self-admittedly not a person of faith, his and other similar statements have been widely shared by evangelicals in recent days.

Gimba Kakanda, a Nigerian official, responded to Maher’s and others’ claims, connecting their timing to Nigeria joining 141 other countries in endorsing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Kakanda suggested that a campaign to highlight Nigeria’s problems was an attempt to get them to withdraw from the declaration.

According to Kakanda, Nigerian Christians and Muslims have alternately accused each other of genocide over the years. “In reality,” he wrote, “Nigeria’s conflicts are multi-faceted, driven by ethnic rivalries, land disputes and criminality, with religion often secondary.”

Many of the posts about the supposed “Nigerian genocide” have come from religious leaders who have either supported or have been largely silent about the over 67,000 people who have been killed in Gaza since October 7. They often include the question, either implicit or explicit, “Why are we silent on Nigeria and talk too much about Gaza?”

Why? It could be that the historical actions of the West created many of the elements that have led to the violence in Nigeria. However, unlike Gaza, we are not actively funding the weapons of terror that kill Nigerians.

All Violence is Violence Against God

What is most concerning about this evangelical selectivity is the implication that violence against Christians is the only violence that deserves our attention.

People groups across the globe enact terror against others, many in the name of religion. And historically, no one religion has a monopoly on violence. In fact, the British imperialism that created the conditions for what is now occurring in Nigeria was violence in the name of Jesus.

People of faith must name and pray against violence, regardless of its source or target. We must be aware of how our actions and inactions have perpetuated violence, especially when it is done in our name and with our tax dollars. And we must guard against elevating one instance of violence to shield us from the consequences of our complicity in other acts of violence.