Are Christians Being Persecuted in Nigeria as Trump Claims?

BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front): The BBC’s latest deep-dive into Nigerian violence spends several thousand words trying to walk around the question of whether Christians are being systematically targeted. Their answer: “Maybe, but probably not.” The problem is, they drown that uncertainty in so much qualifying language and finger-pointing that readers are left more confused than informed. Let’s cut through that noise.

When President Donald Trump threatened to “go into Nigeria guns-a-blazing” over the killing of Christians, he wasn’t pulling those figures out of thin air. He was echoing claims made by U.S. politicians like Senator Ted Cruz, advocacy groups, and NGOs reporting tens of thousands of Christian deaths since 2009. The BBC set out to debunk or clarify those numbers –but instead delivered a long-winded report that questioned every data source while offering no clear replacement.

The gist of their finding is this: yes, thousands have been killed in Nigeria’s ongoing violence, but the BBC argues the reasons are “complex” – a mix of land disputes, ethnic conflict, and terrorism, not purely religious persecution.

At the center of the numbers war is InterSociety, a Nigerian NGO claiming that over 100,000 Christians have been murdered by jihadist and Fulani militant groups since 2009. Those numbers have been widely cited by Cruz, Christian groups, and conservative media. The BBC calls those figures “opaque,” accusing InterSociety of fuzzy math and unverifiable sourcing. When pressed, the group admitted it compiles older data, “summary statistics,” and local reports – basically layering estimates on top of estimates.

Fact-checking the group’s claims, the BBC found major inconsistencies. For example, InterSociety’s claim that 7,000 Christians were killed in the first eight months of 2025 was based on 70 cited media reports, but about half of those stories never even mentioned religion, and many were double-counted. The BBC’s own count landed closer to 3,000 total deaths, with the religious identity of the dead unknown.

Meanwhile, international tracking groups like ACLED paint a far smaller picture. Their verified data shows around 53,000 civilians (Muslims and Christians) killed in all political violence in Nigeria since 2009. Of those, only a few hundred were confirmed to be targeted explicitly for their Christian faith.

The BBC does make one strong point: groups like Boko Haram and ISWAP absolutely terrorize civilians, but their victims are often Muslim villagers who reject their ideology. Even the so-called “Fulani jihadists” may be better described as armed herders fighting for land and water in a collapsing state – criminals first, religious warriors second.

Adding another layer of confusion, the BBC points out that factions of the Biafran separatist movement, including the banned IPOB and the self-declared Biafra Republic Government in Exile, have lobbied U.S. lawmakers to amplify the “Christian genocide” narrative for their own political ends. InterSociety has been accused of having ties to these groups, though it denies the connection.

So what’s real? Christians are indeed being killed in Nigeria… but so are thousands of Muslims and non-religious civilians. The BBC’s report argues this is less about holy war and more about state collapse: jihadists, militias, and herder gangs exploiting ethnic and religious divides to seize territory.

Where the BBC loses the plot is in its refusal to call things what they are. In a country where entire villages – Christian and Muslim alike – are wiped out weekly, breaking down the motive behind every machete swing misses the bigger issue: There are a lot of Nigerians dying because their government has lost control.

The short version?.. Forget the BBC’s 5,000-word ramblings. Nigeria’s killing fields aren’t about faith – they’re about failure.