Christians in Nigeria are Living Under Terrorist Rule

There are different ways of ruling a population. A government rules through laws, courts, police and institutions. An occupying army rules through force. A terrorist can rule more crudely still: make people afraid to attend church, afraid to farm their land, afraid to travel along a road, afraid that their children will be kidnapped, and afraid that armed men may descend upon their village during the night. You do not need a parliament building or a presidential palace if fear determines how other people live.

That is increasingly the reality confronting Christian communities in parts of Nigeria. To say that Christians there are living under "terrorist rule" does not mean that Boko Haram, Islamic State West Africa Province or armed Fulani militants formally govern Nigeria. They plainly do not. Nigeria has a federal government, armed forces, police and functioning institutions across much of the country. But sovereignty means more than having a flag flying over a government building. If the state cannot reliably protect citizens from armed groups that determine whether they can worship, work or remain in their ancestral communities, then practical sovereignty has begun to pass from the government to the men carrying the guns.

The evidence is grim. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom has repeatedly documented serious violations of religious freedom in Nigeria involving Boko Haram, ISWAP, armed Fulani militants and other violent groups. In its 2026 reporting, USCIRF said Fulani militants had perpetrated some of Nigeria's most notorious and deadly attacks upon religious communities, "often but not exclusively against Christians." It also reported continuing large-scale incursions onto Christian farmers' agricultural lands, raids on religious sites and kidnappings of religious leaders and ordinary believers.

The qualification matters. Nigeria's violence cannot honestly be reduced to a children's-book story in which every victim is Christian and every perpetrator Muslim. Muslims have also been murdered by jihadists and other armed groups. Fulani violence has complicated ethnic, economic and land-use dimensions, including long-running disputes between pastoralists and farmers. Banditry and kidnapping for ransom further complicate the picture. Anyone claiming that every violent death in central Nigeria is simply an act of Christian persecution is making the situation easier to understand by making it less true.

But complexity can itself become an excuse for looking away. The fact that a conflict contains disputes over land, ethnicity, cattle, criminality and political power does not magically eliminate religious persecution when Christian communities, churches and clergy are deliberately attacked. Boko Haram and ISWAP are not imaginary theological constructs invented by Western conservatives. They are Islamist extremist organisations, and USCIRF continues to identify them as perpetrators of severe religious-freedom violations.

Perhaps the most revealing testimony concerns ordinary Christian life. At a January 2026 USCIRF hearing, evidence was given that Christians in Nigeria's Middle Belt were afraid to gather for worship because of the possibility of violent attack. That sentence deserves to be read slowly. Imagine living in Australia, Britain or the United States and calculating on Sunday morning whether going to church might result in your children being kidnapped or your congregation attacked. That is not merely "religious tension." It is terror performing one of terrorism's fundamental political functions: changing behaviour through fear.

The terrorists do not need to attack every church. They need only establish the credible possibility that any church could be next. Once that has been achieved, the threat travels farther than the gunmen themselves. A village changes its routines. Farmers hesitate to work distant fields. Families leave. Congregations shrink. Roads become dangerous. Priests and pastors become kidnapping targets. Communities begin organising their lives around what armed groups might do.

That is government by fear.

Nigeria's Christians also inhabit the historical shadow of Boko Haram, whose very name has become synonymous internationally with jihadist brutality. The movement and its offshoots have bombed churches, attacked villages, murdered civilians and abducted children. ISWAP continues operating in pockets of Nigerian territory, and USCIRF's 2026 annual reporting notes that Leah Sharibu, kidnapped as a schoolgirl in 2018, remains in ISWAP captivity. Other Christian girls and young women have continued to be abducted.

A child kidnapped in 2018 and still held years later should make the comfortable world stop for a moment. Imagine the international attention if an armed Christian militia had kidnapped a Muslim schoolgirl, reportedly held her for refusing to abandon Islam, and continued holding her eight years later. There would rightly be outrage. There should be no less outrage because the captive is Christian.

There has at least been some movement. Nigeria's security forces have mounted substantial operations against militants, and in August 2026 they announced the rescue of more than 300 hostages in a major operation around Kainji Lake National Park. The United States has also increased security cooperation with Nigeria against jihadist organisations. These developments demonstrate that it would be unfair to say the Nigerian state is simply doing nothing.

But successful rescues also illuminate the scale of the underlying catastrophe. A country does not rescue hundreds of hostages from militants unless hundreds of people have first fallen under the power of militants. The achievement of the rescuers should be celebrated while the circumstances making such an operation necessary should horrify us.

The fundamental obligation of a state is elementary: protect its citizens. Before climate strategies, diversity programs, international conferences and grand development plans comes the ancient bargain upon which political authority rests. Citizens obey the law and the state prevents armed men from arriving at night to kill them. When a government repeatedly fails at that basic task, discussions about policy sophistication become almost surreal.

For Christians, there is another dimension. The persecution of Christians is not an historical curiosity confined to Nero's Rome or communist dictatorships. Christians today continue to live in places where openly practising their religion carries risks almost unimaginable to comfortable Western believers. In Nigeria, those risks can involve kidnapping, displacement and death.

Western Christianity can sometimes lose perspective about this. Christians in affluent societies argue about whether Christmas decorations remain sufficiently Christian, whether a politician mentioned God in a speech or whether a television program mocked traditional believers. Some of those cultural battles matter. But elsewhere the question is much more primitive: can we gather to worship without being murdered?

There is an uncomfortable biblical familiarity about all this. Christianity was born under persecution. Christ never promised His followers perpetual political security. The apostles preached under governments that could imprison or execute them, and the early Church grew while martyrdom remained a real possibility. Nigerian Christians who continue attending worship despite genuine danger stand much closer to that ancient Christian experience than most Western believers ever will.

That does not mean persecution should be romanticised. Martyrdom is not something governments should manufacture through incompetence. Christians are not obliged to shrug at preventable slaughter because persecution occurred in the Book of Acts. Governments have a moral obligation to defend innocent life, and other nations have legitimate grounds for pressing Nigeria to fulfil that obligation.

Nor should concern for Nigerian Christians become hostility towards Nigerian Muslims. Muslims themselves have been massacred by extremist groups. Islamist terrorists routinely kill Muslims whom they regard as insufficiently pure, insufficiently obedient or simply inconvenient. Christians and peaceful Muslims therefore have an obvious common enemy in organisations that believe theological conviction can be enforced with rifles and bombs.

The distinction must nevertheless be maintained between Islam as the religion of hundreds of millions of peaceful people and Islamist terrorism as a political-religious ideology. Refusing to name the latter does no favour to the Muslims who are also murdered by it. Boko Haram and Islamic State do not become less Islamist because acknowledging their ideology makes Western commentators uncomfortable.

The real scandal is that communities can remain exposed year after year while the outside world periodically notices another massacre and then moves on. We have developed an extraordinary international vocabulary for human rights, religious freedom and the protection of minorities. Governments publish reports. International organisations hold conferences. Politicians express concern. Meanwhile somewhere far from the conference rooms, villagers wonder whether armed men will arrive tonight.

This is why "terrorist rule" is not merely rhetorical excess when applied carefully to the lived circumstances of some Nigerian communities. Rule ultimately concerns who determines behaviour. If you decide whether I may attend church, whether I can harvest my crops, whether my family must flee its home and whether travelling down a particular road risks abduction, you exercise a terrible form of power over me even if your name appears on no ballot paper.

The Nigerian state remains the lawful government. The terrorists remain criminals and insurgents. But wherever citizens must arrange ordinary life around the anticipated commands and violence of armed groups, the state has surrendered part of the substance of sovereignty while retaining its appearance.

Christians in those places do not need another international seminar explaining that their predicament is complicated. They need security. They need terrorists defeated, kidnappers prosecuted, villages protected and displaced families able to return home. They need churches where attending Sunday worship is an act of faith rather than an act of physical courage.

Until that elementary freedom exists, parts of Nigeria will continue to demonstrate an ugly political truth: terrorists do not have to capture the capital to rule people's lives. Sometimes they need only make everyone afraid.