A blind eye to genocide

“If you don’t know what’s going on in Nigeria, your media sources … [stink],” Bill Maher said on a recent episode of his talk show. Only he used a bit more colorful language to make his point.

“You are in a bubble,” he added.

The host of Real Time with Bill Maher made those comments regarding the intense persecution of Christians in Nigeria – a story few in the mainstream media are willing to cover.

Though Maher, a left-wing political commentator, is admittedly not a believer and at times openly mocks and criticizes Christianity, even he finds it appalling that the issue is essentially being ignored.

“They are systematically killing the Christians in Nigeria. They’ve killed over 100,000 since 2009. They’ve burned 18,000 churches,” Maher said about Boko Haram, the violent Islamist group that terrorizes the region.

Staring at the facts

According to Open Doors (opendoorsus.org), a global organization that seeks to support persecuted Christians worldwide, Nigeria ranks among the most dangerous places in the world to practice the Christian faith.

Annually, Open Doors releases a World Watch List, ranking 50 countries where Christians face the most intense persecution. The 2025 list revealed that from October 2023 to September 2024, of the 4,476 Christians killed worldwide, 3,100 of those killings occurred in Nigeria. Statistically, that means nearly 70% of Christians who are killed due to persecution are in Nigeria.

According to Open Doors, the data also shows that more people are killed for their Christian faith in Nigeria than all other regions of the world combined.

Looking to help

The startling numbers have led to calls to redesignate Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC), a label applied to the country during the first Trump administration but later dropped under the Biden administration.

A CPC designation is granted by the secretary of state as a means of applying pressure and sanctions to countries found to be in violation of religious freedoms under the International Religious Freedom Act.

In a March 2025 hearing before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins advocated for a renewed CPC designation.

On October 6, U.S. Rep. Riley Moore (R-WV) called on Secretary of State Marco Rubio to redesignate Nigeria a CPC, urging him to take “immediate action to address the systematic persecution and slaughter of Christians in Nigeria.”

Though not a call for a CPC designation, on September 9, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced a bill titled the Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act.

Cruz cited many of the same statistics as Maher, and on October 3, he posted on the social media platform X that “officials in Nigeria are ignoring and even facilitating the mass murder of Christians by Islamist jihadists. It’s time to hold those responsible accountable.”

Cruz claimed his bill, which was still in committee as of press time, would bring accountability through “sanctions and other powerful tools.”

Despite the efforts of Perkins, Moore, Cruz, and a few others, as of press time, little had been done to garner the widespread media attention the persecution merits.

In an unexpected twist, it was Maher who asked a more probing question when he drew a sharp distinction between sparse media coverage of the atrocities in Nigeria and the feigned outrage over the alleged genocide in Gaza.

“Where are the kids protesting this?” Maher asked.

“This is so much more of a genocide attempt than what is going on in Gaza,” he said. “They are literally attempting to wipe out the Christian population of an entire country.”