Muslim Attacks On Nigerian Christians Should be a Wake Up Call

By: Chris Johnson

As Christians worshipped at an all-night prayer vigil this past April, the pastor leading the service was shot dead and fifteen worshippers were kidnapped.

You probably didn’t hear anything about this atrocity, because it happened in Nigeria. While such an event would be headline news in the United States for weeks, in Nigeria it is a fairly common occurrence.

In fact, just over a week ago, something almost exactly the same happened just a few hours away from the scene of the April attack. “3 Christians killed at evening prayer vigil; gunmen abduct 15 others in attack.”

When you read a headline like that one from the Christian Post, we can still make this assumption pretty safely: It didn’t happen in the United States.

We take our safety for granted when we attend church events. When the unimaginable happens — as it has several times in recent years — it still takes us completely by surprise.

But a safe day at church is not something Nigerian Christians can take for granted. These two fatal attacks and kidnappings happened just over a month apart and only a few hours away from each other. And the province where they occurred is considered one of the safer locations in that part of the country.

Every time a church in the Middle Belt of Nigeria is not attacked, every night a Christian village is not raided, it is an answer to prayer.

While local and national governments issue tough statements about tracking down the perpetrators and rescuing the kidnapped victims, they have also responded by ordering citizens to suspend all-night prayer and worship services.

When the attacks are motivated by hatred for the faith of Nigerian Christians, it is hard not to see such mandates as siding with the terrorists attacking churches, particularly when these all-night prayer vigils are likely held because of the very threat of violence against Christians.

In response to Islamic terrorist attacks, the government is effectively ordering Christians to pray less about an end to the terrorist attacks. The president and much of the government are Muslim, by the way.

And it is Islamic terror. Despite some claims that raids by Muslim Fulani herders are primarily about finding new pastureland, the targeting of Christian prayer services makes it clear that these attacks target Christians for their faith. These are acts of religious violence.

As Christians in the US pray for our brothers and sisters in Nigeria, we must also be aware that the ideology which motivates and justifies these attacks is growing here in our own country, and even in my own state of Michigan.

A prominent Democrat candidate for U.S. Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, has refused to condemn Hamas when given the opportunity. When he has spoken negatively about terrorism, it has often come with caveats such as “hurt people do hurt people.”

In a previous governor’s race, when his tiptoeing around the issue of terrorism was challenged by a Christian candidate, Patrick Colbeck — who told him that as a Christian he didn’t hate Muslims — El-Sayed replied, “You may not hate Muslims, but Muslims hate you.”

El-Sayed joins a growing number of prominently placed Muslim public officials who openly and proudly govern with Muslim values, subverting the traditions and culture that have made America great: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, to name just a few.

In fact, for a list of Muslim elected officials as of 2022, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) compiled this directory: https://www.cair.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/directory_us_muslim_elected_officials.pdf. You will note that Michigan led the nation with 39 Muslim elected officials as of four years ago.

In Nigeria, the tactic is violence. In New York City and Dearborn, it is political — at least for now. Everywhere, the goal is domination. The very word “Islam” means submission — as in, the whole world must submit to Islam.

As the ideology that poses critical threats to our Christian brothers and sisters in Nigeria grows in the United States, our prayers ought to be not only for Christians in Nigeria, but here at home as well.

 

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