ROGER BOYES
Why Trump wants to save Nigeria’s Christians.
President’s intervention may be heartfelt but it also fits his domestic anti-secularist agenda.
Tuesday December 23 2025, 7.14pm GMT, The Times
Christians are under threat around the world from weak governments and authoritarian regimes. They face displacement, abduction, ransom-taking, arson attacks on churches. The Trump administration, it seems, is taking seriously claims of persecution and systematic genocide in Nigeria, home to Africa’s largest Christian population. Egged on by the rapper Nicki Minaj, the president has embarked on what might be called transactional Christianity by offering the Nigerian government $1.6 billion of aid for health projects in return for added security for Christians.
Earlier, Trump had threatened “to go into that now-disgraced country guns a-blazing” unless its leaders cracked down. A trigger-happy Christmas message for the Trump era. But the genocide claim was contested and Trump’s threat of an all-out attack seemed, even to his more devout advisers, to come over as a little unseasonal.
Nigeria’s information minister says the Christian persecution reports were “false, baseless, despicable and divisive”. The country’s leaders seem to think there is a hidden western, Washington-steered agenda to present Nigeria as a sectarian hotbed, to turn it into a Libya or Sudan. But there have been many massacres, many kidnappings and, although the authorities say the attacks sometimes also target Muslims, it is difficult to view what is going on as anything less than a fight for cultural supremacy.
Last month gunmen broke into a Christian boarding school in central Nigeria, snatching more than 300 pupils and a dozen teachers. It was the third such raid in November. In June some 200 Christians were killed in a village in the central Benue region. Pope Leo called it a “terrible massacre” but he too has fought shy of calling it a genocidal act lest his words deepen divisions.
The fact is there are several causes of this violence: Muslim herders in search of good pasture land graze on fields owned by Christians and tensions soar. Terrorist groups such as Boko Haram and Islamic State offshoots favour Christian hostages, not just because they can strike a blow in a civilisational conflict but also because they can pocket bigger ransoms. Massacres are often part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Burn a church and the community breaks up, terrain is conquered.
But it remains a terrorist campaign against Christians. A recent letter to The Times from a group of pastors relayed testimony from victims in Nigeria of Boko Haram kidnappers. They were told by their captors: “If you were Muslim, you wouldn’t be tortured like this.” Forced conversion to Islam is part of the strategy. There is, then, plainly a case for humanitarian intervention.
The president seems to want to go further, partly as a tribute to the recently murdered conservative evangelical Christian Charlie Kirk. “Did you know 125,000 Christians have been murdered and 19,000 churches destroyed by Muslims in Nigeria in the last 15 years,” Kirk posted on social media, adding: “Weird how that never gets any attention. Wonder why.”
Those figures are questioned, not least by the Nigerian government, but they gave some headwind to the Republican Christian right. Senator Ted Cruz introduced the Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act, which holds the country’s leaders responsible for allegedly facilitating violence against Christians, enforcing blasphemy rules and sharia law. Trump ratcheted up the pressure and designated Nigeria a “country of particular concern” — a label that opens the way for executive action and which could be used as a kind of shield by Christians who consider themselves endangered.
That seems like a welcome gesture of moral concern. But there’s more to it than that. Trump is tapping into Samuel Huntington’s immediate post-Cold War prediction that the world’s defining conflicts are no longer ideological but cultural, religious and civilisational. Nigeria’s internal conflicts offer an opportunity to turn identity into a rallying call, a global stage on which moral leadership can be asserted. Trump is not only making a foreign policy intervention but also taking up the battle cry of the culture wars at home: it tells his base that the US is threatened not so much from abroad as from secularism, liberal elites, the assault on traditional values. Nigeria’s Christians have become proxies in a story, Trump’s (and Kirk’s) narrative about America under siege.
What would Christmas be without a dose of cynicism? But Trump’s engagement with the fate of the Nigerian Christian faithful might actually be heartfelt. This is a man, after all, who has prayed on Air Force One and who once told a roomful of pastors that he hears the voice of God. His capitalised social media posts sometimes come across as mini-sermons, his rallies as crusades. Between the spectacle and the sermon there could be a man who truly fears for the safety of believers and who feels comfortable as a protector.
If so we could be in for some interesting U-turns in the next year of his presidency as a showman-cum-saviour. Could he also demonstrate compassion for those persecuted for faiths other than Christianity? The Uighur Muslims of China, for example, or the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar?
That could, like the Nigeria initiative, be transactional but Trump advisers will no doubt argue: why don’t rich Muslim save their own? Yet the stage could now be set for a partial retreat from his policy of cutting great swathes of the US overseas aid budget. Assistance linking health with the security of minorities, that’s Christian and Muslim lives, makes sense, and not just at Christmas. The Times.
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