Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body. (Hebrews 13:3)
"When Christians are murdered in Nigeria, the media goes silent." That is how Congresswoman Nancy Mace of South Carolina opened a video posted to X on Thursday 29 October 2026, over footage of burned churches and displaced families. "Churches are being burned. Families are being driven from their homes. More than 5 million Christians were forced to flee. God protect our people."
She is right, and she has named only half of it. There are two silences over the killing of Christians in Nigeria. The first is in the newsrooms of New York, London and Lagos, which report the biggest massacres for a day, strip out the faith of the dead, and move on. The second is in Abuja, and it is the deadlier of the two: a government that calls the killings "false" and "malicious" when foreigners mention them, whose soldiers sit a mile from a burning village and do not come, whose police arrest Christian youths within hours when a Fulani leader is killed and arrest nobody when eighteen Christians are, and whose courts take seven months to charge anyone for the worst massacre of the decade. This article sets out the record of both, with names, dates and the words of the people responsible, and closes with what a Christian should do about it.
Picture: from Congresswoman Mace's video on X. Credit: Rep. Nancy Mace.
The numbers nobody disputes
Nigeria is the deadliest country in the world in which to be a Christian. Only the size of the toll is argued over.
- Open Doors, whose annual World Watch List is the most cited measure, counted 4,849 Christians killed for their faith worldwide in its 2026 reporting year, 3,490 of them in Nigeria, 72 per cent of the global total. The year before it was 3,100 of 4,476.
- Intersociety, a Nigerian civil-society group in Onitsha, counts higher and faster: 3,083 Christians killed and 3,193 abducted between January and August 2026, rising to 3,426 killed by 10 October. Its figures are compiled from local reports and are not independently verified.
- Aid to the Church in Need published its "Persecuted and Forgotten?" report on 27 October 2026: jihadists and radicalised Fulani militias have helped displace more than 3.5 million people inside Nigeria, at least a million of them Christians.
- United Nations experts warned in June 2026 of "credible reports of killings, abductions, sexual violence, forced conversion targeting Christians" amid "persistent reports of impunity, institutional failures, and inadequate protection by authorities."
- Amnesty International counted 10,217 people of all faiths killed by armed groups in Nigeria in two years to 2025.
Mace's own figures, 5 million displaced, 9,100 churches destroyed, 850 hostages, 600 clergy attacked, sit at the high end and come from older cumulative estimates. Use whichever set you like. Thousands of Christians a year are killed for their faith, and a million or more have lost their homes.
The first silence: the press
The test case: Yelwata
On the night of Friday 13 June 2025, armed men descended on Yelwata, a town in Guma local government area of Benue State where Christians displaced by earlier attacks had taken shelter in and around a Catholic mission. For about three hours they shot, hacked and burned. "They surrounded Yelwata and started shooting and killing people," the village head, Julius Joor, said. "They forced people out of their homes, poured fuel, and set houses ablaze." The diocese of Makurdi's roll of the dead has 271 names, 67 of them children; other counts say about 150. Either way it was one of the worst single massacres of Christians anywhere in the world this decade.
Madeleine Kearns, writing in The Free Press under the headline "As Christians Are Slaughtered, the World Looks Away", found that in the days afterwards the major American and British outlets barely mentioned it, and those that did called it a clash between farmers and herders. It took Bill Maher, who is not a Christian, to say on HBO three months later: "They are systematically killing the Christians in Nigeria. If you don't know what's going on in Nigeria, your media sources suck. You are in a bubble."
Three habits that amount to silence
The biggest attacks do get a day's coverage. When gunmen killed at least 62 people in Binnari, Taraba State, on 23 October this year, the Associated Press, Reuters and Al Jazeera all carried it. The Media Research Center, which has tracked American network news on Nigeria since 2016, found long stretches, in 2016, 2019 and again in 2025, when ABC, CBS and NBC aired nothing on massacres of Christians while covering lesser Nigerian stories. What Christians in Nigeria experience as silence is three habits:
- The frame. Attacks are reported as "clashes between farmers and herders", "communal violence" or "banditry", and the religion of the dead is left out. The Binnari report that reached most of the world called the attackers "bandits" and never said who the victims were. Aid to the Church in Need says church attacks are "presented primarily in terms of ethnic conflict, competition over land and water resources"; the Vatican's observer at the United Nations, Archbishop Ettore Balestrero, says hostility toward Christians is "frequently overlooked in international media coverage". Truth Nigeria's September study, "How Nigeria's Media Rewrites Massacres into 'Clashes'", traces how the softer wording in Nigerian papers is copied by foreign ones.
- The follow-up. A massacre gets a day; the funerals, the camps, the absence of arrests and the next attack on the same village do not. Yelwata has had almost no foreign reporting since the first week.
- The scepticism. When advocates say "genocide", the press fact-checks the word instead of reporting the killings. CNN's Christmas Day 2025 explainer was headlined "Trump says violence in Nigeria targets Christians. The reality is more nuanced"; Al Jazeera ran "No, Bill Maher, there is no 'Christian genocide' in Nigeria". Those pieces are right that the picture is complex. They are wrong when complexity becomes a reason to say less.
The excuses, and why they do not hold
Newsrooms give reasons. The violence is complicated: Boko Haram and ISWAP kill Muslims who refuse them as readily as Christians, and in the Middle Belt land, cattle and politics are tangled up with religion. The numbers are contested, and every inflated figure gives an editor a reason to spike the piece. Benue and Plateau are far from the Lagos and Abuja bureaus, and the men who kill villagers have killed journalists. And since Senator Ted Cruz, Mace and then President Trump took the subject up in 2025, many newsrooms file it under American culture war rather than African mass killing.
None of that explains a 271-body massacre getting less coverage than a celebrity divorce. Complexity is a reason to report more carefully, not less. And the foreign correspondents who rely on Abuja for access and figures tend to adopt Abuja's vocabulary, which brings us to the second silence.
The second silence: Abuja
Denial
When the world has raised the subject, Nigeria's government has answered with denial. President Tinubu dismissed claims of a systematic campaign against Christians as "false" and "malicious" in a statement of 30 September 2025, and said in December that the crisis is "rooted in historical, economic and criminal issues, not religious issues". His spokesman Bayo Onanuga called reports of thousands of Christians slaughtered "a gross exaggeration", told Senator Cruz his figures were "malicious, contrived lies", and told Secretary of State Marco Rubio that "Muslims' lives matter too." The information minister, Mohammed Idris, called the genocide narrative "false, baseless, despicable, and divisive" and blamed lobbyists in the United States. A presidential adviser called it "a hoax".
The denial reaches down to the men who are supposed to catch the killers. When terrorists shouting "Allahu akbar" killed 22 Christians at Kawel in Plateau State on 22 June 2026, including a pastor, the state police commissioner described the attackers as "hoodlums" and urged residents to "continue their lawful activities". Binnari's attackers were "bandits". The word "Christian" does not appear in the official statements, and so it does not appear in the wire copy either.
Delay
Yelwata is the test case for the government too. Nearly seven months passed before, on 1 February 2026, nine suspects were arraigned at the Federal High Court in Abuja; only then did a forensic team exhume 105 bodies from the mass graves to gather evidence. Julius Joor, who buried his cousin, said: "We are crying. We are not government and we do not have power, so we have to be hopeful that we will get justice." The Catholic Bishop of Makurdi, Wilfred Anagbe, had already told a United States House subcommittee that the government had abandoned the survivors and was downplaying "an escalating crisis of Christian persecution and genocide".
Yelwata is the exception for having reached a courtroom at all. The Christmas Eve 2023 killings in Bokkos, Plateau State, in which about 200 died, have produced no prosecutions. Neither have the Holy Week attacks of 2026 in Benue, Kaduna and Nasarawa, nor, as far as any public record shows, the killings in Plateau and Benue through September and October this year. Christian Solidarity Worldwide, surveying the record in September, concluded that Nigeria's minorities "don't need new laws, they need the old ones enforced", and that the impunity "is what the system produced on purpose, precisely when prosecuting would have cost politically". When the state does prosecute, it can be strange about it: the two men accused of lynching the Christian student Deborah Samuel in Sokoto in 2022 were tried for "criminal conspiracy and inciting public disturbance" rather than murder, police witnesses failed to appear, and the magistrate dismissed the case.
Absence
The most damning record is of soldiers who were there and did not come.
- Kawel, Plateau, 22 June 2026. The attack began shortly after midnight on a police post and a clinic, where six people were killed including patients. The village's ten civilian guards, armed with hunting rifles and slingshots, were overwhelmed. Seth Lot Damwesh stabbed one attacker before he was shot; the Reverend Markus Azi died defending his home so that his wife could escape. Soldiers of Operation Enduring Peace were stationed about a mile away and received distress calls while the killing went on, including from Truth Nigeria's reporter. They arrived at about six in the morning, two hours after the attackers had left. Twenty-one were buried in a mass grave.
- Ondo, Benue, 14 July 2026. Residents warned the soldiers at the Ogobia outpost that an attack was likely. "We called again while the attack was underway," said Joshua Oche, "but no one came. People feel abandoned." Two were killed. Hundreds of Christian youths blocked the Otukpo-Agatu federal highway with burning tyres.
- Naridon, Kaduna, 26 July 2026. At least 30 killed, eight of them children; one man lost five children in a night. The attack lasted about three hours. Security forces stationed less than a mile away did not respond.
- Bokkos and Mangu, Plateau. Pastor Moses Machen, who survived the Christmas Eve 2023 attack by fleeing into the hills, told Christianity Today: "During one of the attacks, I asked security officers to intervene, but they said they did not have orders to do so."
- Binnari, Taraba, 23 October 2026. Residents said they called for help during the attack and it came late. Sixty-two died, fifteen of them pulled from the Benue River. Amnesty International Nigeria called the authorities' efforts to protect civilians inadequate and said: "Issuing bland statements condemning these horrific attacks is not enough."
Sometimes the absence is dressed up as action. On 1 June 2026 Army Headquarters announced that troops had "successfully rescued 23 kidnapped passengers" after an attack on Aiyegunle Igun Bunu in Kogi State. The community's development association replied that no such rescue took place: the attackers operated from two until four in the morning, distress calls went unanswered, three truckloads of soldiers arrived after they had gone, and the troops photographed travellers who had escaped on their own. "As we are writing this none of the victims either from the community or commuters has been rescued."
Two systems of justice
On 26 June 2026 the Benue chairman of the Miyetti Allah cattle breeders' association, Ardo Mohammed Risku, and an associate were killed in Otukpo. Within hours police had arrested ten Christian youths and seven traditional rulers. On 10 and 12 July Fulani militia attacked Akpachi and Otukpo-Nobi in the same county and killed eighteen Christians. More than a day later the security agencies had announced no arrests, and none have been reported since. "We appear to be living under two different systems of justice," Inalegwu Adah of Otukpo told Truth Nigeria. "When Fulani leaders were killed, arrests came within hours. But after entire Christian communities are attacked, we are left asking where the perpetrators are."
The same state that cannot find the killers of Christians found and jailed Liatu Samuel Dawa, a Christian woman in Borno, for fourteen years, in a case the Christian Association of Nigeria has questioned; we reported it here. And when captured terrorists are tried, they may not be punished: the army's Operation Safe Corridor has "reintegrated" 2,190 surrendered or captured insurgents, and the Chief of Army Staff, General Olufemi Oluyede, defended the policy with the parable of the Prodigal Son. A woman from Kaduna whose brother is still held by bandits put the victims' view: "The question of amnesty should not even arise."
To be fair where fairness is due, the state can move when it wants to. After a video of young men in Enugu chanting "give us rifles to go and kill Christians" went viral in October, the police arrested a JIBWIS member within days. The Kaduna governor directed the security agencies after Naridon "to apprehend the perpetrators and bring them to justice". The directive is always issued. The apprehension rarely follows.
The church's own silence
The government's indifference has a chilling effect inside Nigeria. In July 2026 the Catholic and Protestant bishops of the north made a joint statement that Truth Nigeria called a break with "decades of silence", and the northern chairman of the Christian Association of Nigeria, Joseph Hayab, admitted that many church leaders "have been intimidated into silence". CAN's president, Archbishop Daniel Okoh, has said that Christians' "cries for justice and protection are too often met with delay or denial", and after the Enugu video he asked the government "to move beyond condemnation and establish the facts". The Catholic Bishops' Conference, in August, called for "intelligence-led security operations capable of identifying and dismantling criminal networks", which is a polite way of saying that none exist.
Deflection
Abuja's last line of defence is to say the whole subject is propaganda. The presidency has blamed the "Christian genocide" narrative on foreign lobbyists and on the Biafran separatist movement IPOB, and a Lagos paper, TheCable, found that the most active X accounts pushing the phrase in 2025 were indeed Biafra supporters. Christians who care about the truth should know that this excuse is sometimes handed to the government gift-wrapped. On 31 October an American talk-radio producer posted a clip to X captioned "These are Christians in Nigeria who were beheaded by Muslims"; it was reposted 1,200 times in a day. We traced it. It was first uploaded in August by an account that describes itself as IPOB, which captioned it then as soldiers killed in an army camp; the same account recaptioned it in September as "Christians"; and Nigerian fact-checkers traced the footage to the Boko Haram attack of 5 June 2026 on the army's base at Mandaragirau in Borno State, where five soldiers and three militiamen died. The dead were real, and so is the persecution of Christians, and the false caption helps only Abuja. Yelwata's 271 do not need borrowed footage. "You shall not bear false witness" (Exodus 20:16) is not suspended because the cause is just.
What changed when Washington spoke
On 31 October 2025, after months of pressure from members of Congress including Mace, President Trump declared that "Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria" and designated the country a Country of Particular Concern. He threatened to cut aid and told the Pentagon to "prepare for possible action". On Christmas Day 2025 the United States struck Islamic State positions in north-west Nigeria, and in January 2026 Trump said there could be more. Nigeria, which had denied any genocide, said it would "welcome American support".
Coverage spiked, then subsided. The denial did not change, and neither did the killing. Morning Star News counted six Christians killed in Plateau State on 3 and 4 October 2026, three more in Benue on 7 October and one in Kaduna on 1 October; Truth Nigeria reported twelve dead in Benue the same week; Binnari followed on 23 October with 62. A year after the designation, Nigeria's answer to its own murdered citizens is the one Amnesty described: a bland statement, and silence.
How a Christian should respond
Scripture does not let us look away. "Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body" (Hebrews 13:3). "If one member suffers, all suffer together" (1 Corinthians 12:26). The believer in Lagos or London who does not know what happened at Yelwata or Kawel is, in Paul's terms, a limb that has stopped feeling.
So, first, break the first silence yourself. "Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute" (Proverbs 31:8). Follow the outlets that do the reporting, Truth Nigeria, Morning Star News, the Catholic agencies, and share their work. Name the dead and the places: Yelwata, Kawel, Naridon, Otukpo, Binnari. A story the press will not tell is a story the Church must.
Second, hold the government to its God-given duty. The ruler "is God's servant for your good... an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer" (Romans 13:4), and "woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees... to turn aside the needy from justice" (Isaiah 10:1-2). A government that will not arrest the killers of its citizens, and calls those who notice liars, has failed the first test of government. Nigerian Christians are entitled to say so, and their brothers abroad are entitled to say it to their own governments, which can make Abuja listen.
Third, tell the truth, including the inconvenient parts. "A false balance is an abomination to the LORD" (Proverbs 11:1) cuts both ways. Use Open Doors' figures, say where the others come from, do not share a video you have not checked, and let the verified truth be terrible enough.
Fourth, pray and give. Pray for the bereaved and displaced, for the pastors and bishops who are threatened, for the soldiers and police who do stand between villages and their attackers, and for the journalists who go where others will not. Give to the charities on the ground, such as Aid to the Church in Need, Open Doors and the dioceses that run the camps.
And do not despair of either silence. "Shall not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night?" (Luke 18:7). The Lord who saw Abel's blood from the ground (Genesis 4:10) sees Benue's. Our job is to make sure that when the world finally looks, the record is there.
For more on this subject read our reports on the JIBWIS member arrested for calling for rifles to kill Christians, on Liatu Samuel Dawa, jailed for fourteen years in Borno, and on the killing of Orthodox Christians in Ethiopia, and see our News section.
Questions this article answers
What did Nancy Mace say about Christians in Nigeria?
In a video on X on 29 October 2026 she said: "When Christians are murdered in Nigeria, the media goes silent. Churches are being burned. Families are being driven from their homes. More than 5 million Christians were forced to flee. God protect our people." In earlier posts she has cited 9,100 churches destroyed, 850 hostages and 600 clergy attacked.
How many Christians are killed in Nigeria each year?
Open Doors counted 3,490 Christians killed for their faith in Nigeria in its 2026 reporting year, 72 per cent of the world total. Intersociety, a Nigerian group whose figures are not independently verified, counts 3,426 from 1 January to 10 October 2026. Aid to the Church in Need says more than 3.5 million people are displaced in Nigeria, at least a million of them Christians.
Does the mainstream media ignore the killing of Christians in Nigeria?
Largely. Wire services report the largest attacks for a day, as they did for Binnari in October 2026, but usually omit the victims' faith, use the "farmer-herder clashes" frame, rarely follow up, and since 2025 have treated the subject as a partisan American issue. The June 2025 Yelwata massacre, with up to 271 dead, drew almost no Western coverage.
What has the Nigerian government done about the killing of Christians?
Mostly denied it. President Tinubu called the claims "false" and "malicious" and his ministers call them a "hoax" and foreign propaganda. Nine suspects were charged over Yelwata only after seven months; the Christmas 2023 Bokkos killings and the 2026 Holy Week attacks have produced no prosecutions. Residents of Kawel, Ondo, Naridon and Binnari say soldiers stationed nearby did not respond to calls during the attacks.
Why are there no arrests after attacks on Christians in Nigeria?
Victims and analysts point to centralised security that answers to Abuja rather than the states, troops without local knowledge or orders, a slow and apathetic justice system, and political cost: Christian Solidarity Worldwide says the impunity is produced "precisely when prosecuting would have cost politically". In Benue, police arrested seventeen people within hours when a Fulani leader was killed, and nobody after eighteen Christians were killed two weeks later.
What was the Yelwata massacre?
An attack on the night of 13 June 2025 on Yelwata, Benue State, where displaced Christians sheltered at a Catholic mission. The diocese of Makurdi lists 271 dead, including 67 children; other counts say about 150. Nine suspects were arraigned in Abuja on 1 February 2026, nearly seven months later.
Is the viral video of "Christians beheaded in Nigeria" real?
The clip shared on X on 31 October 2026 is real footage but wrongly described. It was first posted by an IPOB-affiliated account in August as the aftermath of a Boko Haram attack on an army base, then recaptioned in September as Christians killed by Fulani Muslims. Fact-checkers traced it to the 5 June 2026 attack on the Mandaragirau base in Borno State, in which soldiers and Civilian Joint Task Force members died.
What has the US government done about Christians in Nigeria?
President Trump designated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern on 31 October 2025, threatened to cut aid, and ordered strikes on Islamic State targets in north-west Nigeria on 25 December 2025. Nigeria denies a genocide but has accepted American security cooperation.
How should Christians respond to persecution in Nigeria?
Remember the persecuted as members of the same body (Hebrews 13:3, 1 Corinthians 12:26), speak for them with verified facts (Proverbs 31:8, Proverbs 11:1), hold government to its duty to punish wrongdoers (Romans 13:4, Isaiah 10:1-2), pray for them, give to the charities that serve them, and trust God's justice (Luke 18:7).
Sources: Rep. Nancy Mace's posts on X (29 October 2026 and October 2025); Open Doors World Watch List 2026 and 2025; Intersociety reports (September and October 2026) via Catholic World Report and Vanguard; Aid to the Church in Need, "Persecuted and Forgotten?" (27 October 2026); UN OHCHR press release (June 2026); Amnesty International Nigeria on Binnari (24 October 2026) via Sahara Reporters and Daily Nigerian, and Amnesty's two-year count via Genocide Watch; The Free Press (June 2025); Bishop Wilfred Anagbe's testimony to the US House Subcommittee on Africa; Christianity Today, "Nigeria Prosecutes Suspects of 2025 Christian Massacre" (April 2026) for the Yelwata arraignment, Julius Joor, Pastor Moses Machen, the Deborah Samuel case and Operation Safe Corridor; Truth Nigeria on Kawel (June 2026), on Otukpo and Ondo (July 2026), on the Kogi rescue claim (5 June 2026), on the northern bishops (July 2026) and "How Nigeria's Media Rewrites Massacres into 'Clashes'" (September 2026); Barnabas Aid and International Christian Concern on Naridon (July 2026); Christian Solidarity Worldwide, "Nigeria's religious minorities don't need new laws" (September 2026); The Hill on prosecutions; statements by President Tinubu (30 September and December 2025), Bayo Onanuga (September and October 2025) and Mohammed Idris via Legit.ng, Premier Christian News, AllAfrica and Newsweek; CAN statements (October 2025 and October 2026) via CSW and Church Times Nigeria; the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Nigeria (27 August 2026) via Sahara Reporters; Bill Maher, Real Time, 26 September 2025; NewsBusters/Media Research Center; CNN (25 December 2025) and Al Jazeera (2 October 2025); Morning Star News (October 2026); ABC News and CBS News on the Country of Particular Concern designation and the December 2025 strikes; TheCable's analysis of IPOB-affiliated accounts (October 2025); on the recycled video, X's media records for the posts of 20 August, 7 September and 31 October 2026, FactWatch (27 August 2026), FactCheckHub (10 September 2026) and Truth Nigeria, ICIR and Sahara Reporters on the Mandaragirau attack.