If you watched Rep. Chris Smith on Fox’s Big Weekend Show over the weekend, you saw a blunt warning that Americans should stop looking the other way while Christians are being hunted abroad. Smith described what’s happening in Nigeria as a horrific slaughter and pleaded with Washington to treat religious freedom as the national-security emergency it is. The clip makes clear this isn’t some distant humanitarian footnote — it’s a crisis demanding action from leaders who still believe America stands for something.
The facts are ugly and they aren’t invented by alarmists — independent monitors and faith groups have recorded thousands killed, countless churches burned and millions displaced across Nigeria’s Middle Belt and north. U.S. watchdogs and Christian-right advocates point to steady, verifiable patterns of attacks by jihadist groups and roving militias that disproportionately target Christian communities, turning villages into gravesites and sending survivors streaming into camps. This isn’t theoretical; it’s a concrete collapse of basic protections for worshipers and families who deserve America’s voice and America’s help.
President Trump’s recent move to label Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern was the kind of moral clarity this crisis has long needed, and it set off the right kind of pressure on Abuja to stop pretending these are random clashes. That designation gives Washington levers — from sanctions to conditioning security assistance — that can force accountability where polite words from diplomats never have. Conservatives who have been demanding that human-rights talk be matched with policy should be encouraged; words must be followed by consequences when entire communities are being erased.
Of course, the predictable chorus of global elites and appeasing diplomats immediately cried foul and pointed fingers at every excuse except the obvious: jihadist networks and reckless local actors are killing people for their faith. Nigeria’s government has pushed back and blamed broader insecurity, but that dodge doesn’t change the tombstones piling up in Benue, Plateau and beyond. The mainstream U.S. media have been slow to cover the scale of the carnage, which is why outspoken members of Congress — men like Smith and others — deserve credit for forcing the conversation into the open.
Smith also touched on the broader world where brutal regimes like Vladimir Putin’s exploit chaos, weaken democracies and callously ignore the plights of faith communities whenever it suits their strategic calculations. Americans should understand: dictators celebrate our inattention. If Washington forgets that our moral leadership is a strategic advantage, tyrants and extremists will fill the vacuum and Americans will wake up one day to a world much darker than the one our parents and grandparents defended.
The choice is simple and stark. Congress and the next administration must stop treating religious freedom as a boutique issue and make it central to foreign policy — use the CPC tool, restrict aid to complicit actors, and back regional partners who actually secure vulnerable communities. We owe Christian brothers and sisters — and all people of faith under threat — a government that will stand and, if necessary, act to defend the innocent rather than wring hands and hope the problem resolves itself.
