Nigerian Christians have been facing intense persecution from the extremist group Boko Haram and other similar groups since 2009. Yet few people seem to be aware of it.
As Newsweek reported back in August, 7,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria so far in 2025, for an average of 35 killings per day.
Religious violence in Nigeria is nothing new. There have been periodic outbursts of violent attacks between Muslim and Christian groups in Nigeria going back as far as the 1940s.
But this era of Christian persecution came with a new brutality from religious extremist groups, started in 2009 with the rise of the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram.
Since then, human-rights group the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law estimates that 189,000 civilians have been killed, with 125,000 of them being Christians and 60,000 being liberal Muslims. At least 12 million Christians have been displaced.
Another human-rights group, Open Doors International, ranks Nigeria seventh in countries that face the most Christian persecution.
Although there was some reporting on this issue months ago, like the Newsweek article, Bill Maher brought more attention to it in a September episode of his show, Real Time with Bill Maher.
Maher said that although he is not a Christian, he sees this as an attempted genocide against Christians in Nigeria. He called out young people, asking where they were when it came to protesting this issue.
The main point he was trying to make is that big news outlets were not giving much attention to this tragedy overseas. In the New York Times or the Washington Post, coverage related to Nigerian Christians was quite limited before Bill Maher’s statement. Now that President Trump has threatened military action in Nigeria, more stories are being written.
But the news outlets aren’t totally at fault. People are to blame as well. A majority of the American public turns a blind eye to the atrocities going on in Nigeria. So whatever content is published about the issue goes under the radar.
After all, this tragedy, like so many others across the world, is overshadowed by mainstream conflicts. It is time to put an end to that and stop the normalization of it.
