by Simon Caldwell, TCW
WHERE in the world is it most dangerous to be a Christian? Afghanistan? North Korea? No, it’s Nigeria.
According to the Open Doors charity, Nigeria has moved from the seventh most dangerous country in 2022 to the top of the list in 2024 after 3,100 people were killed and 2,830 kidnapped in that year.
When the death toll is counted for 2025, it is highly likely that Nigeria’s Christians will again emerge as the world’s most persecuted people; one massacre has been followed by another. About 62,000 Christian civilians have been killed by Islamists since 2000, with numbers rocketing in the last decade thanks to high-grade weaponry arriving from countries destabilised in the so-called ‘Arab Spring’.
By and large the rest of the world has ignored this awful persecution but on Friday, US President Donald Trump did what Joe Biden had consistently refused to do and designated Nigeria as a ‘Country of Particular Concern’ because it engages in or tolerates ‘particularly severe violations of religious freedom’.
Writing on TruthSocial, President Trump said: ‘The United States cannot stand by while such atrocities are happening in Nigeria . . . we stand ready and willing and able to save our great Christian population around the world.
‘If the Nigerian government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the USA will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may well go into that now disgraced country “guns-a-blazing” to completely wipe out the Islamic terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.
‘I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack it will be fast, vicious and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our cherished Christians! Warning: the Nigerian government better move fast!’
This intervention must be a godsend to the Christians of Nigeria who just two weeks ago were surely brought to the brink of despair by the bizarre comments of Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, that the violence was not sectarian but a ‘social conflict’ between herders and farmers.
The cardinal must have known that his words contradicted what the Nigerian bishops have been screaming from the rooftops for several years, but he chose instead to echo the position of their Muslim-controlled government.