And in despair I bowed my head; “There is no peace on earth,” I said;
“For hate is strong, And mocks the song Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Thanks for reading The Duck of Minerva! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

My family and I go to our church’s Christmas morning service, in addition to the Christmas eve service. It’s a short service, with light attendance, but it helps to remind of us the point of the holiday.

When I heard about Trump’s air strikes on Nigeria—meant to help Nigerian Christians—the Christmas carols we sang were replaced in my head by Longfellow’s “Christmas Bells.” My government had not only conducted a pointless military strike, was defended it as an expression of Christmas. This is offensive from a religious perspective, but also dangerous. It will make things worse for the Christians it was meant to defend.

Trump’s “concern” for Nigerian Christians

I wrote recently on concerns about violence against Nigerian Christians. The country has long been divided between Christians and Muslims, with recurrent violence. Between this sectarian divide and attacks on Christians by Boko Haram, Christians have been facing a serious threat there. As I found in a recent study, Christians do face significant repression in the region when compared to other religious communities. Some people will try to downplay the suffering of Nigeria’s Christians—especially since it means they get to oppose Trump—but that would be inaccurate.

The conflict in Nigeria is obviously religious, but there are degrees to which religion affects conflicts. The goal is to recognize the religious elements and manage them.

The Trump Administration, which claims to stand for Christian values, has expressed concern about this situation. Trump raised this issue in a 2018 meeting with Nigeria’s President, and has named Nigeria a “Country of Particular Concern” for religious repression. This seems the natural extension of that.

But there are a few reasons to doubt the Trump Administration’s sincerity.

One is uncertainty whether these strikes will do anything; this is a long-running insurgency that became tied to the Islamic State. What are a few strikes on camps going to do about it?

Another is the Trump Administration’s overall approach to the world. Even as Trump was raising concerns about Nigerian Christians he was cutting refugee intake, provoking opposition from both conservative and progressive Christians who see such care as part of their Christian mission. And in Trump’s recently National Security Strategy, defending Christians didn’t come up at all. It’s hard to see this as a true priority.

Finally, as with most of Trump’s foreign policies, it’s hard to see a plan behind the strikes. Given that Trump has gutted the State Department—which would normally take the lead on diplomatic efforts to promote religious freedom—how does he plan to actually help Nigeria’s Christians? We’ll most likely see some airstrikes, then he’ll move on.

The negative impact of Trump’s Nigeria strikes

So there is a good reason to doubt whether anything useful will come from these strikes. There’s also reason to think they’ll make things worse, for Nigerian Christians and Christianity in general.

Trump is actively undermining the efforts of international religious freedom advocates and advocates for persecuted Christians.

The Christmas timing was intentional. There is no indication there was an imminent threat necessitating the strikes, like a planned attack on Christian targets. Instead, the Trump Administration has been planning this for a month. And they tied it to Christmas with shameful macho bravado. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said they are “always ready, so ISIS found out tonight — on Christmas.” Trump went even further, posting:

“May God Bless our Military, and MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists, of which there will be many more if their slaughter of Christians continues.”

This is so obviously offensive. The same people claiming Christmas is being diluted and secularized because sometimes people say “Happy Holidays” are using the birth of Jesus Christ to cheer about killing people. It doesn’t matter that they are bad people. Christian teaching on just war approaches it as something to be approached cautiously and as a last resort. As I discussed with Trump before, it also requires right intention; desire for revenge does not count. The constant misuse of Christianity for political purposes—the shameful way evangelicals bent Scripture to support Trump and Trump’s divine invocations to justify his rule—harm the faith. And Jesus was pretty clear in his denunciation of misusing faith to lead people astray.

But there are more immediate negative effects.

One can debate whether the violence in Nigeria is really “religious” or counts as persecution. Both sides commit violence. Much of the violence is tied to non-religious reasons, like differing economic models or personal disputes. While, again, Nigerian Christians are suffering, it’s inaccurate to present this as a broad, systematic campaign of violence against them due to their faith.

At the same time, I think it is dumb to argue that something only counts as “religious” if it involves two groups reading their Scripture and acting in response. Of course every instance of violence will have territorial, economic, or other material motivations. There are often overlapping religious and ethnic divides. But numerous studies have found that if you have religious identity divisions or religious ideology on top of these other considerations, the violence will be more intense.

What this means is that yes the violence in Nigeria is obviously religious. Christian-Muslim divides intensify tensions over other issues. Christians are targeted as Christians. Just a week before Christmas, gunmen attacked a church and kidnapped numerous people. Even if “deep down inside” those gunmen didn’t care about Christianity, they still chose a Christian target and disrupted the ability of their victims to worship in peace.

But there are degrees to which a conflict is religious, and the goal is to recognize the religious elements and manage the tensions around them to avoid it getting worse. Ron Hassner has written about how religious leaders have attempted to do this with sacred spaces and both Knox Thames and I have written on how sacred spaces can be used to create peace.

Trump did the opposite of managing religious tensions:

• He launched a military strike that will cause no operational harm to IS, and will likely only provoke retaliation. Not against US targets, of course, but against Nigerian Christians.
• By taking sides in this divide he has made any actions by Nigerian Christians suspect, seemingly in league with the United States.
• He changed one of the holiest days of the year into a celebration of military might in support of Christian interests, which will only increase religious divides and make Christian symbols seem even more of a target.
• By militarizing US international religious freedom policy, he’s proving right the critics who claimed it was always an instrument of US power, not a principled defense of rights.

Over and over again, in social media posts and my writing, I’ve called on religious freedom activists and advocates for persecuted Christians to stand up and denounce what the Trump Administration is doing. By this point, Trump is actively undermining their efforts.

I hope that everyone involved in this remembers how Longfellow’s poem ends:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: “God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail, The Right prevail, With peace on earth, good-will to men.”