Religion in Nigeria
[17][18][19] Northern Nigeria has also been the site of ongoing Islamist insurgency which has led to the death and displacement of tens of thousands of people.
Hsu et al. (2008) found that the WCD appears to overestimate Christian identification and cautioned against what seems to be uncritical acceptance of figures given by religious groups of their membership.
The criticisms offered by Hsu et al. (2008) have been supported by evidence found by Nigeria Mckinnon (2020), which demonstrated that the WCD had substantially overestimated the Anglican proportion of the population.
[38][39] Shehu Usman dan Fodio established a government in Northern Nigeria based on Islam before the advent of European colonialism.
In recent times, there has been break out of religious crises in the ancient city of Kano with scores of Christians dead and their properties destroyed.
He was a Cameroonian preacher who slammed the government, something which led to his arrest in Nigeria in 1975, yet by 1972 many people followed him across society, ranging from the elite to Koranic students called almajiral or gardawa and unemployed migrants.
Maitatsine and his followers became separate from orthodox Islam, condemning the corruption of the religious and secular elites and the wealthy upper classes’ consumption of Western goods during the petrol boom in 1974–81.
[68] The history of Christianity in Nigeria can be traced back to the 15th century, when the Portuguese were the first Europeans to arrive on the shores of the region via the Atlantic.
By and large, Protestantism particularly the Pentecostals, Apostolic and evangelicals constitute the major Christian population of Nigeria from the late 1990s to the present.
[96] In 2020, the pope appointed a Nigerian professor, Kokunre A. Agbontaen-Eghafona, to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (PASS) in the Vatican.
The British wanted to procure certain products, such as oil and palm nuts, and to introduce cotton cultivation, and they built railroads through the country with local labor starting in 1893.
[101] The bulk of religious violence exists mainly in impoverished urban centers in the northern regions of the country, although coastal centers in the south are also prone to instances of political violence based on religious beliefs, as this is where the non-Hausa Christian minorities reside that are disfavored by the predominantly Hausa Muslim government.
[102] Non-Hausa groups residing in southern regions of Nigeria are marginalized by the republic, treated as second-class citizens, and denied their entitlements.
[109] Presbyterians arrived in the late 17th century in the Ibibio, Annang and Efik land and the Niger Delta area and had missions in the middle belt as well.
Most such facilities remained in 1990, although in many cases schools had been taken over by the local state government in order to standardize curricula and indigenize the teaching staff.
[113] After World War I, smaller denominations such as the Church of the Brethren (as Ekklesiyar Yan'uwa a Nigeria), Seventh-day Adventists and others worked in interstitial areas, trying not to compete.
Although less well-known, African-American churches entered the missionary field in the 19th century and created contacts with Nigeria that lasted well into the colonial period.
By the 1980s, African music and even dancing were being introduced quietly into western oriented church services, albeit altered to fit into rituals of Euro-American origin.
Even medium-sized towns (20,000 persons or more) with an established southern enclave had local churches, especially in the middle belt, where both major religions had a strong foothold.
The middle belt and the west and southwest of Nigeria remain the hold of Protestants (Pentecostal, evangelical and indigenous spring of Christian denominations).
Within the cities and subethnic groups of Yorubaland, traditions differ widely, but all are closely connected with nature, music, and historical roots of various towns.
A more reserved way of life expresses a theology that links local beliefs to a centrally-placed government and its sovereignty over the neighborhood or communities through the monarch, the king.
[116] In addition to ensuring access to and the continual fertility of the land and the people, seasonal festivals act as a spectacle for "tourism" contributing to regional productivity.
"Society in general has more gradually and selectively expanded to accommodate new influences, it is fairly certain that they will continue to assert their distinctive cultural identity in creative and often ingenious ways".
[126] The movement was pioneered by the Yoruba people in south-west Nigeria, as it is common to find (within one family) Christians and Muslims living happily together and celebrating each other's religious festivals.
[132] As in many parts of Africa, there is a great amount of stigma attached to being an atheist in addition to institutionalized discrimination that leads to treatment as "second-class citizens.
"[133][134][135][136][137][138][139][140][141][excessive citations] In a 2010 poll by Pew Research Center 51% of Nigerian Muslims agreed with the death penalty for leaving Islam.
[143] While religious conflict is not new in Nigeria's borders, in the 1980s, serious outbreaks of violence between Christians and Muslims, and between the latter and the government occurred, mainly in the North.
In a speech in the European Parliament, in October 2022, bishop Wilfred Chikpa Anagbe, of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Makurdi, compared the situation of Christians in his country to "nothing short of a Jihad clothed in many names: terrorism, kidnappings, killer herdsmen, banditry, other militia groups" and called on the international community to abandon what he termed a "conspiracy of silence" on the subject.
[149] Nigeria is number six on Open Doors’ 2023 World Watch List, an annual ranking of the 50 countries where Christians face the most extreme persecution.
