In a video that began circulating this week, the Senior Pastor of Guiding Light Assembly, Wale Adefarasin, challenged what he characterised as recent Western exaggeration of attacks on Christians in Nigeria. He questioned why the United States had suddenly “shown love” for Nigerian Christians and whether the motives behind the rhetoric were genuine.
Pastor Adefarasin, speaking in a sermon captured on video, said that the killings of Christians in parts of northern Nigeria were not new developments. “For 40 years that I have been a Christian, there have been killings in southern Kaduna, killings on the plateau, there have been riots,” he said, pointing to longstanding communal and religious-conflict zones. He remarked that to frame these events as a “genocide”, as some international voices have done, is misleading. “And so, it’s nothing new. It doesn’t amount to genocide. The way the West are talking about it, it’s as if if a Christian steps on the street, his head will be blown off,” he added.
Turning to Nigeria’s place in global geopolitics and natural-resources realities, Pastor Adefarasin asked whether the United States’ heightened interest stems from economic or strategic exploitation rather than humanitarian concern. “I’m trying to understand this sudden love for Christians. Is it because we now have one of the largest refineries in the world, and no longer have to ship raw materials abroad and bring the finished products? Or is it because of the 21st-century minerals that we now have in our earth, that are used to generate nuclear power for electric vehicles? Are those the reasons that our friends are threatening to invade our country to defend and protect Nigerian Christians?” he queried.
His intervention comes amid waves of reactions from Nigerian government officials, religious bodies and civil-society groups following comments by former U.S. President Donald Trump and other American figures, who alleged that the Nigerian government is failing to protect Christians and that the violence amounts to religious persecution or even genocide. The Nigerian government, meanwhile, has issued repeated statements rejecting the characterisation of the violence as a targeted extermination of Christians, emphasising that both Christians and Muslims have been victims of insecurity and that the crises often stem from complex causes including land disputes, banditry and terrorism.
Pastor Adefarasin’s remarks add a religious-leader voice to the debate, signalling discomfort with the external framing of Nigeria’s internal security challenges and the concomitant foreign intervention calls. He insists on Nigeria’s sovereignty, the need to treat the security problem in its full complexity, and cautions against oversimplifying the narrative into one of a Christian-only victimhood.
see video below