It comes after the Christmas Day bombings of what President Donald Trump called “terrorist scum.”
Trump’s Tomahawk missile strikes capped a years-long push led by Christian activists, Republican lawmakers and American celebrities seeking U.S. intervention in a long-simmering security crisis in Nigeria.
The country’s Christians were dying in silence.
But the biggest push in getting Trump involved came from an unlikely source, Brad Brandon (shown right), CEO at Across Nigeria, told a large gathering at the annual meeting of the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) Tuesday.
Across Nigeria promotes education and brings aid and encouragement to thousands of persecuted Christians annually. Most importantly, the group shares the love of Jesus Christ.
“Last year, if you took all the Christians killed world-wide, 72% of them were killed in northern Nigeria. The year before that it was 90%,” Brandon told the NRB audience.
He estimated that 8,000 Christians were killed in northern Nigeria last year.
Persecution of Christians in Nigeria and elsewhere was addressed in a number of resolutions passed by NRB Tuesday.
“NRB stands in solidarity with persecuted Christians in countries and regions like Nigeria, China, North Korea, Armenia, and the Middle East, and calls for the United States and international bodies to take immediate and decisive action to end the ongoing atrocities and protect the fundamental rights of believers worldwide,” the group wrote.
Speaking in Davos, Switzerland last month, Trump had high praise for the Nigeria strikes.
“In Nigeria we’re annihilating terrorists who are killing Christians,” he said. “We’ve hit them very hard.”
A congressional spending measure released in January would condition half of U.S. aid to Nigeria on whether the country has done enough to stop the violence, advance “religious freedom” and investigate “jihadist terror groups.”
Not finished yet
Trump told The New York Times recently that he would approve more strikes if Christians continued to be killed, and last month, senior U.S. leaders were in Nigeria’s capital to announce a new, closer military partnership between the two nations.
“I wondered for years why people did not want to talk about this, why it was operating under the cover of darkness. Then I realized that a lot of times, the church and the faith community, they talk about what they see in the media,” Brandon said. “If the media is silent then the church is silent. They don’t know because they haven’t been told.
Nigerian government leaders have denied that Christians are being specifically targeted for their faith, calling allegations of a “Christian genocide” false and misleading and saying the violence is driven by generalized terrorism, banditry, and communal clashes that affect Muslims and Christians alike.
Then one media member decided enough was enough.
Last September, in the opening monologue of the HBO show “Real Time with Bill Maher,” the host went off.
“I’m not a Christian, but they are systematically killing the Christians in Nigeria. They’ve killed over 100,000 since 2009. They’ve burned 18,000 churches. They are literally attempting to wipe out the Christian population of an entire country,” Maher said.
He told his audience they needed new media sources if they hadn’t heard this.
Maybe Trump was tuning in, maybe he wasn’t, but Brandon believes it was Maher’s rant that motivated Trump to take action.
“Two months later," Brandon recalled, " President Trump tweeted twice about the genocide that’s happening in northern Nigeria. From all of the meia firestorm that really started Sept. 25 with Bill Maher, President Trump put Nigeria on The Countries of Particular Concern list for the first time since The Biden administration took them off that list."
In the year that Nigeria was removed from the list, 7,000 Christians were killed, Brandon said.
Maher’s monologue “got the president’s attention. The media got the president’s attention,” Brandon said.
Before long Trump was doing more than adding Nigeria to a list.
This is an example of change that can occur when the media reports the news, Brandon said.
“The media got the president to respond, and for the first time, something is actually being done to stop the genocide of Christians in northern Nigeria,” Brandon told NRB.
When the media reports
“It’s not the media’s job to cover things that are popular,” Brandon continued. “That seems to be the trend these days, to go after what’s popular to get the clicks, the likes and all of that. The media’s job is to see things that nobody else wants to talk about and communicate that to the people.”
Christian media have a responsibility to communicate these things to the faith community and church, he said.
The silence of media, whether secular or Christian outlets, allows evil to prevail. But when media isn’t silent, a light shines on the path to good.
People who can do something put action to their new-found knowledge.
“When we do our job, when media does its job, what Bill Maher has proven to us all, is that it works. Something happens. People respond. It’s the media’s role to cover the things that nobody wants to talk about, to cover the things that happen under the cover of darkness,” Brandon said.
