America Must Stand for Freedom: Designate Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern

As violence and persecution against Christians and other believers intensify across the globe, America’s moral clarity and courage are being tested once again. In Nigeria, religious freedom is under siege. Villages are burned, pastors kidnapped, families massacred, all while the Nigerian government looks away. It is time, indeed, it is past time, for the United States to act. The President must immediately redesignate Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern under the International Religious Freedom Act.

A Nation in Crisis, a Church Under Siege

The facts are unambiguous. In Nigeria’s Middle Belt, thousands of Christian farmers have been slaughtered by militant Fulani herders shouting “Allahu Akbar.” Families are driven from their ancestral lands, their homes and churches burned to ashes. According to the Nigerian civic organization Inter Society on Civil Rights and Rule of Law, more than 52,000 Christians have been killed and 20,000 churches destroyed since 2009. Even this year alone, over 900 Christians were murdered in Benue State, where Catholic Bishop Wilfred Anagbe testified before Congress that “the experience of Christians in Nigeria can be summed up as a Church under Islamist extermination.”

Meanwhile, the Nigerian government enforces Islamic blasphemy laws carrying death sentences and long prison terms, persecuting not only Christians but also Muslims and others who dissent. Yet it turns a blind eye to the Fulani militias’ relentless aggression, failing to investigate, prosecute, or even prevent atrocities that are systematically erasing Christian communities from their land.

Moral Clarity in an Age of Evasion

Incredibly, the U.S. government once recognized this crisis for what it is. During the President’s first term, Nigeria was rightly designated a Country of Particular Concern. Professor Wagner served in the U.S. State Department in this administration and saw the ample justification for the designation. Yet, in 2021, that designation was rescinded, replaced with the illusion of progress and the dangerous fiction that these atrocities stem merely from climate change or “clashes” over resources. Such explanations deny reality and dishonor the victims. As the recent letter from America’s faith leaders rightly observes, this “neo-Marxist theory” masks a campaign of organized violence aimed at religious extermination.

Neither international bureaucracies nor political correctness can obscure what the evidence shows: Nigeria’s government is both violating and tolerating egregious abuses of religious freedom. U.S. law explicitly warrants CPC designation in both circumstances. Anything less, a mere “Special Watch List” status, would be, as the letter declares, “a weak and legally inadequate response” that dishonors the American commitment to religious liberty as a foundational human right.

Why the United States Must Lead

Designating Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern is not about punishment, it is about principle. The International Religious Freedom Act provides flexibility, not rigidity. Sanctions are not mandatory; they are one tool among many. What matters most is that America speaks truth with conviction and compassion, that we affirm by action, not rhetoric, that the freedom to worship God is not a privilege granted by government but an unalienable right endowed by our Creator.

To remain silent or indifferent is to become complicit in the suffering of the innocent. When governments persecute believers or allow others to do so, America must not hide behind diplomatic euphemisms. We are called to stand, to speak, and to act.

Justice Demands It

From the founding of our Republic, America’s moral authority has rested not on the strength of its armies but on the righteousness of its principles. Religious freedom is the cornerstone of all liberty; without it, every other right soon collapses.

In Nigeria, men, women, and children are dying for the same faith that inspired our nation’s birth. To abandon them now would be to forsake the very ideals we claim to defend.

The evidence is clear, and the law is clear. Designate Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern, without delay.

For justice demands it.

Conscience requires it.

And the cause of freedom depends on it.