Trump, Nigeria, and “Christian Genocide”
Donald Trump is threatening to invade Nigeria on dubious claims of a genocide against the country's Christian community. Here's why the Christian Right has woven this narrative.
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On October 31, President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he was designating Nigeria a “country of particular concern” under religious freedom legislation. “Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria,” his post began. The next day, Trump posted again to say that he was directing the Pentagon to draw up plans for a military intervention in Nigeria. Trump wrote, “If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”
Trump’s outburst may seem like it came out of nowhere, but it is the product of a well-organized push by conservative American Christian activists to frame Nigeria’s multi-sided conflicts as a genocide targeting the country’s Christian population. This campaign has been going on for years, and it had some success in Trump’s first term—he previously declared Nigeria a “country of particular concern” in 2020. The effort revved up again when Trump returned to office, and it recently spilled into the mainstream on a September episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, then in a post on X by Senator Ted Cruz in October decrying “Christian mass murder” in Nigeria.
There are many people in Nigeria, including direct victims of violence, who see conflict there as a genocide targeting Christians. That is understandable, especially for victims whose faith was explicitly referenced by their attackers. Yet leading experts on Nigeria’s conflicts have convincingly rebutted the “genocide” framing—for years, in fact. Maher’s and Cruz’s recent remarks received a lot of pushback, both from independent commentators and from Nigerian officials.
The narrative of genocide relies on four distortions. First, the jihadist group Boko Haram and its successors and rivals, such as Islamic State West Africa Province, are framed as anti-Christian militants. Second, herders in Nigeria—who are often ethnically Fulani and religiously Muslim—are framed as the unequivocal aggressors in their conflicts with farmers. Third, herder violence against farmers is depicted as religiously motivated and specifically anti-Christian. And fourth, the victims of jihadist violence and herder violence are conflated in order to give the impression of an astronomical death toll driven purely by hatred of Christians and Christianity.
This framework is false on multiple levels. In reality, jihadists—who mostly operate in Muslim-majority areas of northern Nigeria—have killed far more Muslims than Christians, a point reiterated recently by none other than Donald Trump’s Africa advisor, Massad Boulos. And as for herder-farmer violence, it is fueled far more by resources than religion. Herders—far from being the perpetual aggressors—are often the victims of attacks by farmers, all while being squeezed and discriminated against by state governments.
As the Nigerian writer Elnathan John says, in a long and haunting post that deserves to be read in full,
While Trump thunders about Islamic extremism, I’m more interested in the quieter extremism of the everyday lives of Nigerians—the kind that doesn’t trend. The slow violence of a government that cannot feed or protect its people. The bigotry we print on billboards and call faith. The way every disagreement becomes a holy war because real justice feels unreachable.
And he adds later in the essay:
When Christian groups cry genocide, Abuja replies with arithmetic: others have died too. When Muslim groups cry neglect, Abuja blames bandits or “foreign elements.” The tragedy is managed by press release. No minister resigns; no general loses a pension.
The complexities of Nigeria—the way violence is both multi-directional, shockingly extreme, and depressingly banal—are often drowned out when Nigeria comes up in a US political context. Rather, Nigeria has become one of many battlegrounds in a war over the power to define and enforce “religious freedom” and a media war, since October 2023, to debate who is a victim of genocide and who is not. For someone like Maher, the point of invoking “genocide” in Nigeria seems to be to draw attention away from the genocide in Gaza. For conservative Christians, the aim is partly to consolidate influence within the US government.
The History and Structure of a Narrative
The narrative of “Christian genocide” in Nigeria has largely emerged from within a certain sphere of US-based Christian media, Christian think tanks, and right-wing think tanks. More broadly, the narrative dovetails with a wider push to lay claim to the very notion of “religious freedom” and the institutions associated with it. “Religious freedom” is a core liberal principle and indeed a foundational element of liberalism historically (which does not make the term unproblematic), so the battle to define it carries a great deal of political significance.
There is a specifically right-wing version of “religious freedom” that seeks to strategically and selectively deploy it on behalf of (certain) Christians and Jews while denying religious freedom to others—and especially, in the age of the “War on Terror” and its hangover, to Muslims. The violence by Islamic State, especially as its “caliphate” peaked in Iraq and Syria in the mid-2010s, invigorated right-wing efforts to declare that it was Christians who were the leading victims of persecution worldwide. Right-wing think tanks have invested considerable resources into influencing narratives around “religious freedom.” For example, the Hudson Institute has a Center for Religious Freedom, and the Heritage Foundation has mobilized the idea of religious liberty to argue for everything from challenging child vaccine mandates to “going on offense” in promoting Catholic education.
Within the battle over who owns religious freedom, important laws and structures dating to the presidency of Bill Clinton have been key prizes. In the foreign policy realm, these structures include the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), a government-appointed body whose findings do not set policy, and the parallel Office of Religious Freedom (ORF) within the State Department, which is a policymaking office. Both USCIRF and ORF can label foreign nations “countries of particular concern (CPC)” when it comes to religious freedom, but it is ORF’s designation that carries legal and policy weight.
During Trump’s first term, there was a major push to advance the “Christian genocide” framing and to have the Trump administration officially designate Nigeria a “country of particular concern.” From 2018 to 2020, articles using the term “genocide” or “mass murder” were published by the Gatestone Institute, Providence Magazine, Tablet Magazine, the Heritage Foundation, and more. The institutions and authors often drew upon one another’s work—Tablet’s article, for example, excerpted a book titled The Next Jihad: Stop the Christian Genocide in Africa, which was also cited in the article by Heritage. The author of the Providence article, Lila Gilbert, also had an affiliation with the Hudson Institute, which partly republished her article; and with the Family Research Council, where she also discussed similar themes about Nigeria.
Similar books continue to roll off the presses. Robert Royal, a conservative Catholic scholar whose second-most recent book was a defense of Christopher Columbus (“whose courage and vision extended Christian Europe and inspired the American spirit”), published The Martyrs of the New Millennium earlier this year. In a Washington Post opinion piece in October, Royal called for more US government pressure on Nigeria.
A key source of data, then and now, regarding the narrative of “Christian genocide” is a site called Genocide Watch, where posts have repeatedly called the violence in Nigeria a “genocide against Christians”; see one example here from 2020. Genocide Watch was founded by academic and ex-State Department official Gregory Stanton, a figure who has been deeply influential—especially through his template of a ten-stage model for genocide—but who also applies the “genocide” label quite broadly.
Genocide Watch is not a right-wing site per se, and Stanton calls Trump a “Nazi.” Yet Genocide Watch’s conclusions and analyses often have striking utility for right-wing activists. Stanton’s stages framework can be broadly applied, for example with South Africa. A favored narrative of right-wingers in America and South Africa (a narrative now emanating from Trump’s White House) is that white South Africans are facing genocide. Although Genocide Watch has not reached that conclusion, its discussions of South Africa argue that the country is heading in that direction—one 2021 report puts the country at “Stage 6: Polarization” and heaps blame upon the provocative but electorally marginal Economic Freedom Fighters of Julius Malema:
The same impunity results from non-prosecution of murders of white farmers. The Marxist, racist Economic Freedom Front party of Julius Malema encourages these murders, which are meant to terrorize farmers into emigrating from South Africa. Many of the murders are hate crimes. The perpetrators torture, rape, and disembowel their victims. They leave Afrikaans Bibles on dead bodies. White farmers are defenseless because South Africa outlawed private gun possession and disbanded the mutual protection cooperatives organized by farmers in the past.
Arguably there are a few right-wing dog whistles here: the idea that being Marxist is inherently troubling, on par with being “racist”; the notion that EFF are the real racists; the graphic images, complete with the image of Bibles being defiled; and the nod to gun ownership as a supposed barrier to victimization.
Meanwhile, after October 7, Genocide Watch was noticeably reticent to pronounce events in Gaza a genocide. As of 2025, Stanton refers to a “double genocide in Gaza,” concluding, “Both Hamas and Israel have committed genocide.” If Stanton’s remarks about Trump and Gaza are not what the Heritage Foundation or the Family Research Council might prefer to hear, Genocide Watch is nevertheless frequently cited by such groups when it comes to Nigeria—in part because none of the major genocide prevention organizations have declared a genocide there. See, for example, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Early Warning Project page for Nigeria, which discusses the country’s violence in a much different way than Genocide Watch does.
Global terrorism “data” have also proven useful to the narrative of “Christian genocide.” In 2015, the Global Terrorism Index, published by the Institute for Economics & Peace, included “Fulani militants,” labeling them “The fourth most deadly terrorist group of 2014.” The problems with that framing ran deep, especially in terms of describing Fulani herders as a cohesive group that could be compared, in an apples-to-apples way, with Boko Haram, Islamic State, and others. At an even more basic level, the idea of “Fulani militants” as “terrorists” made little sense. Although right-wing and Christian coverage of Nigeria has sometimes dismissed the idea of “farmer-herder conflict” as reductive and misleading, “farmer-herder conflict” is the lens used by the most sophisticated academics and research institutions focusing on the topic.
The framing of the Fulani as “militants” and “terrorists” intersected with escalating tensions around ethnicity in Nigeria at that time, as Muhammadu Buhari (a Fulani and a Muslim) successfully ran for president in 2015 after several years as an opposition candidate. Violence at the community level became fuel for conspiracy theories and accusations that Buhari and other Fulani elites were masterminding “terrorism” across Nigeria. Elnathan John writes, “To call a killer ‘Fulani’ in today’s Nigeria is to declare the motive, deliver the judgment, and close the case. Nuance died here long before the victims.” As Fulani are targeted elsewhere in West Africa and profiled as “terrorists” in Mali, Burkina Faso, and beyond, the promoters of the “Christian genocide” narrative risk fueling a kind of anti-Fulani racism, with implications for millions of people in Africa.
Notably, Christian media outlets sometimes have a more subtle and nuanced approach to Nigeria’s violence than do the right-wing think tanks, although these Christian media accounts ultimately point in the same direction. A March 2019 article in Christian Post included quotes from analysts and witnesses with different perspectives on how to understand Nigeria’s violence—but was headlined “Christian Genocide in Nigeria: 5 Facts You Need to Know.” A recent article from Open Doors, a Christian organization that originated as an anti-Communist effort in Europe in the 1950s, also gestured to some of the counterarguments against the “Christian genocide” narrative but included lines such as “elements of the Fulani tribe have been radicalized with violent Islamist ideology that justifies subjugating Christians as infidels.”
Open Doors’ data and data from its peer organizations have, ultimately, been key to the “Christian genocide” narrative—but their methodologies for determining why victims are targeted have been deeply questioned by scholars such as Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos, who points to a widespread “lack of critical scrutiny regarding the quality, reliability, and consistency of the sources used” in shaping the narrative.
The Policy Picture under Trump, Terms One and Two
Right-wing and Christian lobbying over Nigeria during Trump’s first term was somewhat successful. In December 2020, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo designated Nigeria a CPC. But the move, coming so late, seemed half-hearted and was easily reversed by the administration of President Joe Biden in November 2021. There are numerous reasons why Trump might have been reluctant to go full-bore on the CPC designation, including Nigeria’s vast oil and critical minerals supplies.
Since Trump returned to office, there have been steady calls for restoring the CPC designation. Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, a Republican who is highly active on African affairs, urged a new CPC determination in March. The USCIRF, which has labeled Nigeria a CPC for years, continues to call upon the State Department to follow suit. To take another example, in July ex-Department of Justice Lawyer Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, director of the Conscience Project, published an op-ed in the Hill urging Trump to bring back the CPC designation and then to go even further by declaring genocide:
An acknowledgment that the violence against Christians in Nigeria has reached the level of genocide could inspire a global response of humanitarian aid, economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation and even intervention by the UN Security Council, not to mention action by the International Criminal Court to prosecute individuals and regimes responsible.
The CPC designation, as is already clear from Trump’s own rhetoric, is not the end of the campaign but rather one step in it. Trump may have hesitated during his first term to go after Nigeria, but he now appears to be committed to pleasing the segment of his base that cares deeply about the issue, even at the cost of seriously antagonizing Nigeria. Trump’s bluster is unlikely to result in a military intervention, given the many pitfalls such an intervention would face, but further cuts to aid (on top of the devastating cuts Trump has already inflicted) are certainly possible, all in the service of scoring political points at home.
Feedback Loops Between Nigeria and the US
Trump likely does not think often, or deeply, about Nigeria. As with many of his threats, talk of military intervention could fade as he pivots to other whims and concerns. But that does not mean his decisions and rhetoric around Nigeria won’t do damage.
A report by DW, citing both victims and analysts, includes insightful comments from Samuel Malik of Good Governance Africa regarding the harm that the genocide narrative could do:
It “pressures foreign governments, especially the United States, to adopt punitive and moralistic positions toward Nigeria rather than pursuing constructive, evidence-based engagement,” he said. “Furthermore, it damages the Nigerian government’s international reputation by portraying it as complicit in religious persecution, making it difficult or impossible to get the support it requires to deal with the problem of insecurity.”
One could add that there is explosive potential for genocide claims to collide, once again, with local, state, and presidential politics as Nigeria heads towards general elections in 2027. Electoral violence has been a recurring problem in the country, and 2027 will see a re-election bid by President Bola Tinubu, who won a slim and highly disputed victory in 2023. Framing the country’s security challenges as existential religious conflicts will inevitably turn up the political temperature. More violence in Nigeria would, in turn, only fuel more calls for declaring a genocide there.