You’re listening to part one of an interview with Dr. Robert Royal, conducted by Dr. William Saunders, Director of the Center for Human Rights. Dr. Royal is an accomplished author and speaker, and has taught at several universities. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing, an online publication. To listen to the rest of this interview, click the link in the description or visit humanrights.catholic.edu.
William Saunders: Welcome to another edition of The Barefoot Lawyer podcast. I’m William Saunders. I am the Director of the Center for Human Rights at the Catholic University of America.
And today, we’re going to talk about a topic that’s new to the podcast, but one that I personally worked in since I became a human rights lawyer, which is persecution. When I first – of Christians around the world. When I first got involved in human rights work, it was in defense of Christians in Sudan who were being slaughtered. And today, we’re gonna talk about another country, which is Nigeria. But first, I wanna welcome to the podcast my good friend, Robert Royal, the President of Faith and Reason Institute, Executive Director of this great webpage called The Catholic Thing, which I encourage everybody to check every day. It has a, kind of as Bob says, an op-ed, a 950-word essay on an issue of importance for Catholics. And then Bob has also just… works with Aid to the Church in Need in the United States. So Bob, welcome.
Robert Royal: Great to be with you, Bill.
W: I want to start by just… I’m gonna be making reference to a few things for our listeners, and I hope you’ll follow up on them afterwards. And we will put the information in the notes of the program.
And I’ll just mention quickly that Bob has a book here; I’ll hold it up for those who are watching. It’s called The Martyrs of the New Millennium, and it’s about Christians who have died, Catholics who have died since the beginning of this millennium. And he has a section in here on Nigeria.
Also, I would… I mentioned his webpage, The Catholic Thing. And what gave me the idea to bring Bob on so that you guys could hear from him is, he had an article there called “Of Muslim Cowherds, Catholic Martyrs, and Institutional Decline.”
So, maybe Bob will just start to get into the situation in Nigeria a little bit. Tell the listener about that op-ed or that article you wrote for The Catholic Thing.
R: Yeah, I mean, all those are online, too, so people can go back and actually read that article. I wrote that, I mean, the title may be a little bit odd for most people who aren’t familiar with Nigeria. But I wrote this because I think, unfortunately, a lot of leaders, even in the church, but also in the secular world, point out a particular conflict that does exist in Nigeria.
And that is that there are what are mostly Muslim raisers of cattle, cowherders, who are in competition for land with mostly Christian farmers. And so, there is some conflict between those two groups over economic and social dominance in certain areas. But that’s not the main story.
And what I meant by institutional decline there is that, I think many people in both the church and the secular world use those social conflicts. And there are other, you know, there’s criminality in Nigeria. There’s… people get kidnapped for money. I mean, there are all those secondary things that are happening. But over and above all of that, Christians die in Nigeria; and Nigeria’s about half Muslim and half Christian. But Christians die in Nigeria in larger numbers than in all the other countries in the world combined for anti-Christian reasons.
So, in other words, the main story is that. The main story is people who are being martyred, who are being persecuted, who are being kidnapped, sold into slavery, you know, human trafficking, etc. And if we don’t cast our eye toward that, we’re really not looking at what is the main problem of what’s going on in Nigeria today.
W: Yeah, I want to emphasize, say a couple of things. First, I assume everybody knows where Nigeria is, but maybe not. So, it’s in Western Africa. It’s the largest country by population in Africa. It has a huge percentage – I’m not sure exactly the percentage – of Christians and a Muslim population as well. And there have been some conflicts, of course, over the centuries. But we’re talking about, and we’re gonna talk about, a conflict that is going on right now and is targeting Christians.
Now, I also wanna mention before I forget that Bob and I signed onto a letter that was sent to President Trump, I guess, oh, I don’t know, two months ago or something. And it’s on our website. So, our website is humanrights.catholic.edu. And there’s a subpage there on news, and we have the letter there, and you can read about it, and you can read a link to it.
But anyway, Bob and I signed it because we wanted to urge the president to designate Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern.
And I realize some people listening, you know, you’re not perhaps Washington policy nerds like Bob and I can be, and, you know, you may never have heard of that. But it’s a designation under the law that lets the president draw particular attention, and therefore US focus, to countries that deny religious freedom. Do you wanna say anything about that letter, Bob? I’d just say the president did do it, but anything you want to say about that, Bob?
R: Yeah. You know, it’s odd because, back during the Joe Biden administration, they removed Nigeria from the Countries of Particular Concern; CPC, if any of our viewers and listeners happen to, you know, come across that acronym.
And I think that the situation became so dire, I mean, obviously lots of us who signed that letter had been working on religious liberty throughout the world over years and, you know, had been involved in some of these debates. But shortly before that letter came out, the Washington Post invited me to write an op-ed piece about Christian persecution in Nigeria, and when that happened, it really hit me that the Washington Post which, you know, it tends to be a much more liberal outlet than you would find in the Trump administration, for example, obviously.
But it struck me at that moment that something had changed; that somehow in the American elite commentariat, people had woken up to the fact of what was going on in Nigeria, and so this piece appeared maybe, I don’t know, a few weeks before that letter was signed.
So the atmosphere was ripe for the change, and I hear from some people that, “Well, you know, so what? You put them on this list and they don’t really care,” or, “You engage in sanctions against the Nigerian government and the Nigerian economy, but they can turn to Russia or China or whatever.”
I don’t believe that that’s the case. I know you don’t either. I think that, when you have these circumstances, you use every tool imaginable, and I think these diplomatic tools sometimes are underestimated because we know that in certain Muslim countries, if persecution comes to mind, I’m thinking in particular of Asia Bibi in Pakistan, where she gets a death sentence allegedly for blasphemy against the Prophet.
The international opinion criticizing that country and then bringing pressure to bear; no one likes to be criticized by all the major countries in the world.
So, I think that the restoring of that designation of the CPC, which was, I think, fueled in part by the letter that we signed, but also I just think people became aware of the truth about the circumstance, and that’s a good first step. It’s not the last thing that needs to be done. There’s much more that I think we ought to continue, and we have to keep the spotlight on this horrible situation of Christians in what is basically Central Africa. There’s also the Democratic Republic of Congo and others. But if we don’t look at this, people will continue to do what they’re doing, and what they’re doing is horrifying.
W: Yeah, I agree completely. I think that… exactly what you said. This isn’t the last thing or the only thing, but not to do it is to close your eyes to reality. I mean, this is a Country of Particular Concern. Like you said, I’m gonna repeat it for people so it doesn’t go past them too fast: more Christians martyred here than all the rest of the world, folks. I mean, this is massive, and yes, it’s a little bit complicated, and there are different ways in which this is happening in different parts of Nigeria. Yes, yes, yes, there’s all these qualifications. Fine, but the fact is, Christians are being killed.
The Catholic University of America’s Center for Human Rights has published a documentary on the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights. The documentary features world-class human rights experts from former state department officials to ambassadors and human rights activists. It can be found on our website at humanrights.catholic.edu.