When gunmen stormed villages near Makurdi in Nigeria’s Benue state last year, pastor Emmanuel Ochefu said the attack felt personal.
“They came at night, shouting and burning homes,” said Ochefu, who leads a small Pentecostal church outside the city and spoke with RNS by phone.
“Most of the people killed were Christians. We cannot pretend that our faith is not part of why we are targeted.”
‘Terrifying crisis of religious violence’
Nigeria was the first country mentioned in the introduction of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s annual report released on Wednesday (March 4) describing its “terrifying crisis of religious violence” and connecting it to the politics of the country.
“Nigeria’s religious freedom environment is contextually unique in terms of its violent and complex perfect storm of religious, political, social and economic factors, but it is representative of the alarming persistence of freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) violations that continue to plague millions of people across the globe,” reads the report from the independent bipartisan agency.
The report details the sacrifices of many thousands of “innocents on the altar of religious bigotry” and mass abductions that have devastated religious communities in the north and central regions of the country.
In addition to extremist violence the commission says is religiously motivated, it also points to “corrosive” blasphemy laws at state levels and “pervasive corruption” in the government of Nigeria.
For many Christians in Nigeria’s Middle Belt and northern regions, experiences like the attack on Makurdi have reinforced a deeply held belief they are being persecuted because of their religion.
Complexities
Yet security analysts, government officials and Muslim leaders say the reality behind Nigeria’s violence is far more complex—rooted less in religious ideology than in a volatile mix of criminality, competition over land and resources, climate pressures and decades of weak governance.
The debate reflects a broader struggle to understand one of Africa’s longest-running security crises, which, according to the USCIRF report, has killed almost 53,000 Nigerian civilians due to “targeted violence” since 2009, the year the commission first recommended it be labeled a “country of particular concern.”
In 2020, Nigeria was designated by the State Department with that label, marking it as one of the most egregious violators of religious freedom.
The designation was removed in 2021, but the White House announced in October Nigeria had received it again.
Additionally, the crisis has displaced millions over the past 15 years.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, with more than 200 million people, is broadly divided between a predominantly Muslim north and a largely Christian south. Much of the violence has been concentrated in the northeast, where Islamist insurgents such as Boko Haram and its splinter groups have waged a deadly rebellion since 2009.
But attacks also occur in central states such as Benue and Plateau, where disputes between farming communities, often Christian, and mostly Muslim nomadic herders have escalated into cycles of revenge killings.
Security analyst Peter Akachukwu, based in Lagos, said reducing the violence to a simple religious narrative risks obscuring its underlying drivers.
“What we are seeing is not purely religious persecution,” Akachukwu told RNS in a phone interview.
“Yes, identity plays a role in who is attacked and how communities interpret the violence. But fundamentally, this is about competition for land, poverty, weak law enforcement, and organized criminal networks exploiting those divisions.”
He said armed groups often target vulnerable communities regardless of faith, driven by economic motives such as cattle rustling, ransom kidnappings, and territorial control.
“Religion becomes a marker,” he said. “It is not always the root cause.”
Rising death toll fuels persecution narrative
Still, data from advocacy groups shows why many Nigerian Christians view the crisis through a religious lens.
According to Open Doors, a global Christian watchdog organization, more Christians are killed for their faith in Nigeria than anywhere else in the world.
In its 2025 World Watch List, the organization reported at least 3,490 Christians were killed in Nigeria in their latest reporting period — accounting for the vast majority of Christian deaths recorded globally that year.
The group says violence by jihadist insurgents, including Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province, as well as attacks by armed militants in central Nigeria have disproportionately affected Christian communities.
Over a longer period, estimates vary widely, but some advocacy and monitoring groups report tens of thousands of Christians have been killed since the insurgency began more than a decade ago, with thousands abducted and churches destroyed.
At the same time, United Nations data underscores the overall conflict is far broader. The insurgency in northeastern Nigeria alone has killed nearly 350,000 people, including deaths linked to violence, displacement, and humanitarian crises.
Analysts say the figures illustrate the complexity of the crisis.
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EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Tonny Onyulo and originally published by Religion News Service and edited by The Baptist Standard in this version. Adelle M. Banks contributed to this report.
