Bill Maher is right for the wrong reasons on Nigerian Christians

Nigerian Christians deserve more than "what about"-ism

Angela George, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Bill Maher—the provocative political comedian with a regular show on HBO—seems to relish angering people. While a lot of people can’t stand him, I find him funny, while admitting he irks me occasionally; I remember a segment mocking people who liked cilantro in particular. I also appreciate that he hosts freewheeling debates that you don’t see much anymore on TV.

He recently got positive attention from a surprising source: conservative Christian media. I follow many of these sites because of my work on Christianity and because they tend to pay attention to international Christian persecution, something I also study. In a recent segment, he called out inattention to violence against Christians in Nigeria, criticizing anti-Israel protesters who only focus on violence against Palestinians.

Maher is right that Nigerian Christians are suffering extreme violence, and it’s frustrating that the media and activists don’t seem to care. But he oversimplifies by arguing this is a clear-cut genocide of Christians by Muslims in a way that is not helpful to Nigerian Christians.

What Maher gets right

First, Bill Maher is right that Christians in Nigeria are suffering. When I ran the Pew Research Center’s project on global religious freedom, Nigeria would stick out as one country experiencing persistent religious conflict. Overlapping ethnic, economic and religious divisions have led to conflict for years. This has been exacerbated by Boko Haram—an Islamist militant group committing horrific terrorist attacks in the country. Now it is true that it’s hard to get good data on whether Christians or Muslims suffer more—more on that below—but it’s hard to deny Christians are suffering.

And Maher is right the world isn’t paying enough attention, while activist anger focuses exclusively on Israel. When I used to write for The Huffington Post I noted all the conflicts that involved more deaths than Israel and Palestine and wondered why activists didn’t do anything about them; it didn’t go over very well. There will occasionally be movements, like the Save Darfur campaign or Kony 2012, but they never seem to last.

But even I, someone who has taken flak from the Left for advocating for persecuted Christians, wouldn’t go as far as Maher. 

Moreover, there seems to be some efforts to downplay what Christians are going through. Al-Jazeera ran an op-ed by a senior advisor to the Nigerian government pushing back on Maher’s claims. It provided useful context on the fighting (again, more on that below) but was rather defensive about Nigerian government policies and seemed to argue that Muslims were more threatened than Christians. This doesn’t seem to be a helpful way to address this problem.

What Maher got wrong

But even I, someone who has taken flak from the Left for advocating for persecuted Christians, wouldn’t go as far as Maher. So what did he get wrong?

First, the conflict is more complicated than he let on. Maher discussed it as Boko Haram committing widespread genocide of Christians. Again, Boko Haram is a serious threat and does target Christians. But more is going on. An article in Providence—a conservative Christian foreign policy magazine—discussed the complexities of this situation. The author discussed the “land-use rights” that are at the core of this, exacerbated by government mismanagement, climate change, and Boko Haram’s offensive.

Religion is part of this, as the dividing lines in the conflict are mainly Christian-Muslim and Christians are targeted as Christians. It is difficult to get good relative numbers, though. The Providence article pointed to a study saying Christians are primarily targeted, but some have raised concerns about the methodology of the Christian advocacy groups collecting the data. In a forthcoming article [I’ll update with a link when it comes out] I found that Christians do face the most intense religious repression among religious communities in sub-Saharan Africa, but that is for the entire region so I’d have to do specific analysis for Nigeria.

Wouldn’t it be powerful if Maher were to follow up on this with a segment devoted to understanding the suffering of Nigeria’s Christians, and suggesting ways for his viewers to take action?

But debating which group suffers the most is another problem with Maher’s framing. The best response of suffering of one religious group is to advocate for all religious groups. The international religious freedom campaign—while mired in its deference to the Trump Administration—began with that realization: religious freedom is indivisible, so all peoples must work together. The CAAP Network, of which I am a part (Christians against all persecution) holds an annual day of prayer for all people persecuted for their faith, with an emphasis on the all. If we approach the conflict in Nigeria as “people of faith are being killed for their faith” rather than debating which group suffers more, we’ll be more effective. [There is a concern that Christian persecution is downplayed by the media to a greater extent than other groups. That’s a topic for a different post, but as I also discuss in my forthcoming article this inter-faith advocacy model is still preferable even if that is true]

Finally, by using the suffering of Nigerian Christians as a way to criticize anti-Israel protesters, Maher is ironically doing the same thing he’s attacking: not taking them seriously on their own terms. Nigeria’s Christians don’t matter as a way to criticize anti-Israel protesters; they matter as people of faith (or fellow Christians, depending on your religious beliefs) who need assistance. One of the better criticisms of my aforementioned piece on ignored conflict was the accusation of concern trolling; that wasn’t true, but this framing does open oneself up to such attacks.

Wouldn’t it be powerful if Maher were to follow up on this with a segment devoted to understanding the suffering of Nigeria’s Christians, and suggesting ways for his viewers to take action?