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It\u2019s one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a Christian. What\u2019s going on right now in Nigeria is \u201cpure genocide.\u201d<\/p>\nIt\u2019s one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a Christian. What\u2019s going on right now in Nigeria is \u201cpure genocide.\u201d<\/p>\n
Recently on BreakPoint, I said that it took a lot of courage to be a Christian in Iraq. Just two years ago, the Obama administration called what ISIS was doing to Iraqi Christians \u201cgenocide.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, there are other places in the world where being a Christian requires a lot of courage as well, and, where the treatment of Christians merits the word \u201cgenocide.\u201d<\/p>\n
One such place: Nigeria. By most estimates<\/span><\/a>,<\/span> the population of Nigeria is almost evenly divided between Muslims and Christians. That religious split largely follows geographic lines: The northern part of the country is predominantly Muslim, the eastern and southern parts of the country heavily Christian. The middle, sometimes called the \u201cMiddle Belt<\/span><\/a>,<\/span>\u201d is ethnically and religiously diverse.<\/p>\n Not surprisingly, what makes Nigeria so dangerous for Christians originates in the Islamic north. There, Christians have been on the receiving end of a campaign Open Doors<\/a> <\/span>calls \u201creligious cleansing,\u201d that is, an attempt \u201cto eradicate Christianity\u201d from the region.<\/p>\n One of the most notorious Islamist terrorist groups in the world, Boko Haram, is responsible for killing thousands of Christians and displacing countless more in northern Nigeria. But Boko Haram isn\u2019t the only group targeting Christians there.<\/p>\n In a statement <\/span><\/a>released in late June, Christian leaders claimed that \u201cover 6,000 persons\u2014mostly children, women and the aged\u2014have been maimed and killed in night raids by armed Fulani herdsmen.\u201d<\/p>\n The Fulani are an ethnic group who are overwhelmingly Muslim, and their raids are not always at night. In April, Fulani herdsman attacked a group of Christians during Sunday mass, killing two priests and seventeen parishioners.\u00a0 The same attackers then razed fifty homes belonging to Christians. In fact, earlier in the year, on New Year\u2019s Day<\/span><\/a>,<\/span> 72 people died at the hands of a Fulani attack.<\/p>\n In their statement, Nigerian Christian leaders also complained about the \u201ccontinuous abduction of under aged Christian girls by Muslim youths\u2026\u201d These girls \u201care forcefully converted to Islam and taken in for marriage without the consent of their parents.\u201d<\/p>\n The language used by Christian leaders in Nigeria in their statement to describe what is happening, \u201cpure genocide,\u201d is hard to disagree with. As was the call, directed toward the national government to \u201cstop this senseless \u2026 blood shedding\u2026 and avoid a state of complete anarchy where the people are forced to defend themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n Unfortunately, Nigerian officials are downplaying, if not outright denying, the religious dimension of what\u2019s happening. Instead, they\u2019re calling this a conflict over resources, in this case, over land.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t believe it. For starters, the security forces are, in the words of the statement, \u201cskewed to one religion and one region of the country,\u201d that is, Islam and the Islamic north.<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, this idea conveniently glosses over the one-sided nature of the violence in the region: The Fulani are the hammer and the Christians are the nails.<\/p>\n Finally, any student of the history of genocide or ethnic cleansing knows that conflicts over resources are often just the trigger that unleashes the sort of mass violence we\u2019re currently seeing in the nation of Nigeria.<\/p>\n So, what can we do about this? First, we must pray, continually, for our brothers and sisters there. Second, we have to encourage the White House to continue pressing Nigeria about what\u2019s happening in its Middle Belt, as it did during an April meeting with the Nigerian president<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n President Trump called what\u2019s happening then a \u201cserious problem.\u201d That\u2019s an understatement. It\u2019s past time to make sure that the response to the problem is equally as serious and not understated at all.<\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 2018 John Stonestreet &\u00a0 Roberto Rivera BreakPoint<\/span><\/a>-All rights reserved<\/p>\n It\u2019s one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a Christian. What\u2019s going on right now in Nigeria is \u201cpure genocide.\u201d Recently on BreakPoint, I said that it took a lot of courage to be a Christian in Iraq. Just two years ago, the Obama administration called what ISIS was doing to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":18939,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-20151","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-persecution","8":"wp-image-borders","9":"entry"},"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/watchmanmedia.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/the-kind-of-missionary-persecuted-christians-love-a4tkkuyb.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4bgnN-5f1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/watchmanmedia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/watchmanmedia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/watchmanmedia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/watchmanmedia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/watchmanmedia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20151"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/watchmanmedia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20197,"href":"https:\/\/watchmanmedia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20151\/revisions\/20197"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/watchmanmedia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/watchmanmedia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/watchmanmedia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/watchmanmedia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"image_pdf\"](\"https:\/\/watchmanmedia.org\/wp-content\/plugins\/pdf-print\/images\/pdf.png\" "\\"View")
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