Research for Advocacy

By Babatomiwa M. Owojaiye What is the value of education when it sharpens the mind but corrupts the soul? What happens when literacy outpaces morality, intelligence outruns integrity, and influence becomes divorced from the fear of God? Many Bible interpreters remember Jezebel primarily as a witch, a seductress, or a promoter of idolatry. Yet such descriptions, though true, are incomplete. Jezebel was far more sophisticated than the caricature often painted of her. She was not merely spiritually corrupt; she was intellectually refined, politically strategic, administratively skilled, and highly educated. In many ways, Jezebel represents one of the clearest biblical warnings that education without character can become one of the most dangerous forces in society. Jezebel was the daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Sidonians, and later became the wife of King Ahab of Israel (1 Kings 16:29–31). Coming from Phoenicia—a major commercial, political, and literary center of the ancient world—she likely received elite royal education uncommon for women of her time. Unlike the overwhelming majority of women in the ancient Near East, Jezebel could read and write. In a world where literacy was rare even among men, this placed her among the intellectual elite of her generation. Her literacy was not speculative; Scripture provides evidence of it. In 1 Kings 21:8–10, Jezebel wrote letters in Ahab’s name, sealed them with his seal, and orchestrated the judicial murder of Naboth. This single episode reveals extraordinary administrative competence. She understood political systems, legal procedures, state authority, and public manipulation. She knew how to weaponize bureaucracy, exploit religion, and manipulate leadership structures to achieve evil ends. Jezebel was educated—but not transformed. Brilliant—but morally bankrupt. Skilled—but spiritually perverse. This raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: Can education become dangerous when it is not governed by godliness? Modern society often assumes that education automatically produces virtue. But Scripture repeatedly demonstrates that intellectual advancement does not necessarily lead to moral advancement. A person may possess degrees and still lack discernment; may master information and still be enslaved to corruption; may command institutions and yet remain spiritually bankrupt. Jezebel stands as biblical proof that literacy alone does not produce righteousness.Indeed, some of the greatest evils in history were not committed by ignorant people but by highly educated individuals who used knowledge without conscience. The problem was never education itself. Education is a gift. Daniel was educated in Babylon (Daniel 1:17–20). Moses was learned in all the wisdom of Egypt (Acts 7:22). Paul was highly trained under Gamaliel (Acts 22:3). The issue is not whether one is educated, but whether education is surrendered to God or detached from Him.Jezebel used her education to institutionalize evil. She introduced Baal worship into Israel (1 Kings 18:19), sponsored false prophets, persecuted God’s servants, and attempted to silence prophetic truth through intimidation and violence. Her intelligence became a tool for rebellion against God. She understood influence, propaganda, and political alliance. She recognized that culture could be reshaped through religion and state power working together.It is therefore not surprising that the spirit of Jezebel reappears symbolically in the New Testament. In Revelation 2:20, the church in Thyatira was rebuked for tolerating “that woman Jezebel,” who seduced God’s people into compromise and immorality. Here Jezebel becomes more than a historical figure; she becomes a prophetic symbol of corruption within religious systems. Likewise, Revelation 17–18 presents “Babylon the Great” as a seductive religious-political power opposed to God. The parallels are striking. Both Jezebels formed illicit unions between religion and political power. Both manipulated authority to corrupt worship. Both persecuted God’s people. Both dressed in outward splendor while concealing inward corruption. Both produced spiritual offspring. Both intoxicated nations with deception. Both were eventually judged by God and destroyed through the very systems they trusted (2 Kings 9:30–37; Revelation 17:16–18). This symbolism exposes one of the gravest dangers facing every generation: the possibility of using influence, intellect, religion, and power in service of self rather than truth. Jezebel did not merely oppose Elijah physically; she sought to destabilize him psychologically. After Mount Carmel, Elijah fled in fear because of her threats (1 Kings 19:1–4). Jezebel understood the power of intimidation. She knew how to weaken conviction through fear, exhaustion, and emotional pressure. Her warfare was not merely military or political; it was psychological and spiritual. How relevant this is today. We now live in a world overflowing with education but starving for character. We have more schools but less wisdom; more information but less truth; more exposure but less restraint; more intellectual confidence but less fear of God. The tragedy of many modern institutions is that they produce skilled professionals without moral foundations, articulate leaders without convictions, and influential voices without spiritual depth. The critical question therefore is not merely: Are people educated? The deeper question is: What is their education producing?Is education producing humility or arrogance? Service or manipulation? Integrity or exploitation? Truth or propaganda? Are we raising men and women whose minds are enlightened but whose consciences are darkened? What becomes of a society where intelligence is celebrated but righteousness is optional? Scripture warns, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). Not the beginning of information, but of wisdom. Knowledge without the fear of God can easily become destructive. Satan himself is intellectually superior to every human being, yet utterly corrupt. Intelligence alone is never sufficient protection against evil. The danger is especially severe when gifted, educated, and influential people lose moral restraint. An ignorant wicked man may harm a family; an educated wicked man may corrupt a nation. Jezebel’s education amplified her influence, expanded her reach, and deepened her capacity for destruction. Yet the church today faces another danger—the danger of admiring competence while ignoring character. We increasingly celebrate charisma over consecration, influence over integrity, eloquence over holiness, and visibility over virtue. But God has never been impressed merely by brilliance. Heaven evaluates not only what we know, but what our knowledge produces within us. This is why Christian education must never focus merely on intellectual development while

What the Data Actually Show About Religious Violence in Nigeria– Prof Dr Dennis P. Petri Every few months, a new cycle of violence in Nigeria produces a familiar pattern in the international press. Attacks on churches, pastors killed, communities displaced. Then come the op-eds and the fact-checks. And reliably, two competing narratives emerge, each claiming to correct the other, and neither giving an accurate account of what the evidence actually shows. For anyone trying to follow the debate carefully, the result is genuine confusion: not because the question is unanswerable, but because the information environment is broken. Here is what that looks like in practice. A reader follows the fact-checks in the New York Times, the BBC, or Trouw, sees Intersociety’s numbers dismantled, and reasonably concludes that the religious-targeting claim has been dealt with. That reader will almost never encounter the Observatory of Religious Freedom in Africa (ORFA)’s incident-level data on attacks against Christian communities, the joint International Institute for Religious Freedom (IIRF) and Open Doors report No Road Home on displaced Christians in Benue and Plateau, or the proxy estimation John Bainbridge and I published in Frontiers in Sociology. The debunk travels. The counter-evidence does not. Pledge your support The result is an information environment in which a basic question remains unanswered: is this violence targeting Christians, or is it something else dressed up in religious language? That question deserves a serious answer. What it gets instead is a choice between an overblown framing that the data cannot support and a dismissive counter-narrative that the data also cannot support. Both need to be corrected. The critique that lands The statistics most often cited by advocates of the strongest anti-Christian framing come from a single Nigerian civil society organization, Intersociety, whose reports have been amplified by politicians including Donald Trump and by a wide range of religious advocacy groups. Mainstream outlets including the New York Times, the BBC, and Dutch newspaper Trouw have pointed out, correctly, that Intersociety publishes striking numbers without transparent sourcing. When a statistic cannot be traced to a verifiable methodology, it cannot be used as evidence. That is not political bias; it is basic epistemic hygiene. And the rhetoric that accompanies those numbers often goes further than any data can support. Calling what is happening in Nigeria genocide is a serious legal and political claim. It requires a specific evidentiary standard. The figures in circulation do not meet it. Critics who push back on that framing are right to do so. But here is where careful analysis stops and something more convenient begins. The leap that does not follow From “Intersociety’s data is unreliable” and “the genocide framing is overblown,” much commentary draws a third conclusion: that there is no credible evidence of religiously targeted violence at all, and that the conflict is better understood as a dispute over land and water driven by climate change and demographic pressure. This third claim does not follow from the first two. Debunking a bad source does not validate the opposite conclusion. And the land-and-water framing, while it has real empirical content, is being applied far beyond what its actual explanatory range can support. Rarely are the roots of religious conflict mono-causal. It is true that Fulani herder communities and farming communities are locked in genuine competition over grazing routes and water sources, competition that climate change is making more acute. That is documented, serious, and worth taking into account. But the resource-competition model cannot account for the geographic consistency of which villages are attacked, which buildings are targeted, and which community leaders are killed. If this were purely a resource conflict, we would expect attacks distributed more evenly across farming communities regardless of their religious composition. What the data from the Observatory of Religious Freedom in Africa (ORFA) actually show is a pattern of direct targeting that tracks religious identity in ways a resource model cannot explain. This is not about reading minds or reconstructing what perpetrators intended. It is about what the attack data show. When churches and church gatherings are attacked at rates that far exceed the presence of Christian communities in the population, and when that pattern holds consistently across regions and over time, the evidence of targeting is in the pattern itself. The land-and-water framing circulates comfortably in academic and humanitarian circles accustomed to explaining conflict through material and structural factors, and journalists tend to draw from those same institutional sources. Religious freedom research bodies like ORFA and IIRF are known in specialist circles but rarely appear in the Rolodex of conflict correspondents. The result is that when Intersociety’s numbers are debunked, the debunking feels complete, and the more careful research pointing to a real pattern of religious targeting never enters the frame. The structural problem underneath What makes this debate so difficult to resolve is a structural problem in how humanitarian data is collected. Whether it’s the datasets from ACLED, UNHCR, the International Organization for Migration, and the Internal Displacement Monitoring, they do not contain a column for the religious identity of displaced persons. Three separate dynamics explain why. The first is simple unawareness. Many humanitarian organizations have not historically treated religious identity as a structuring factor in conflict, and their data collection frameworks were built without it. In societies drenched in religion, this is gross neglect. The second is deliberate avoidance: tracking the religion of displaced persons is resisted out of concern that it could politicize operations or compromise neutrality across conflict lines. This is more understandable, but failing to acknowledge the religious variable results in interverntions that are not sufficienctly sensitive or properly targeted, resulting in literally millions of dollars wasted. These are not trivial objections, but the consequence is that a protection-relevant variable is systematically excluded from the record. The third is a practical limitation: in active conflict zones, basic registration is often incomplete or impossible regardless of what organizations intend to collect. Each dynamic produces the same outcome. Religion disappears from the analyses that inform policy and media coverage. The absence of data in official sources is then routinely misread

This submission documents a pattern of violent attacks targeting Christian places of worship in Nigeria, with particular focus on incidents in Kwara and Kaduna States between November 2025 and January 2026. Drawing on field-based investigations, survivor testimonies, and community-level data, the report argues that while Nigeria maintains a strong constitutional and international legal framework protecting freedom of religion, these protections are increasingly undermined by persistent insecurity, especially in rural areas. The submission seeks urgent attention from the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief to the growing gap between legal guarantees and lived realities of religious freedom in Nigeria. Legal Framework and State Obligations Nigeria guarantees freedom of religion under Section 38(1) of the 1999 Constitution, which protects the right to manifest religion in worship, teaching, practice, and observance. Nigeria is also bound by international obligations, including: Under these frameworks, the Nigerian state has a positive obligation not only to respect but also to protect individuals and communities from violations by non-state actors, including armed groups. Documented Incidents of Attacks on Worship Spaces Eruku Church Attack, Kwara State (21 November 2025) Armed assailants attacked a worship service at Christ Apostolic Church (CAC), Eruku, abducting 38 worshippers and killing two individuals. Ransom demands reportedly reached ₦100 million per victim. ECWA Church Omugo Kidnapping, Kwara State (Date: March 22, 2026). Kidnapped victims are still held captive till now On 22 March 2026, armed bandits attacked a Sunday worship service at ECWA Church, Omugo (Ifelodun LGA, Kwara State), abducting eight worshippers after opening fire on congregants. Subsequent ransom demands reached ₦1 billion, later reduced through negotiations. Attacks on Ariko Christians during Easter worship On 5 April 2026 (Easter Sunday), armed bandits attacked worshippers during live church services in Ariko, Kachia LGA of Kaduna State, targeting both ECWA and St. Augustine Catholic Church. At least 7–12 Christians were killed, and dozens of worshippers were abducted after gunmen opened fire on congregants within church premises. Kurmin Wali Church Abductions, Kaduna State (18 January 2026) On Sunday morning worship, armed groups simultaneously attacked three churches, ECWA, Albarka C&S, and Haske C&S, in Kurmin Wali (Kajuru LGA). Verified data confirms 89 worshippers abducted. Victims were beaten, marched into forests, and held under inhumane conditions before eventual release. Key Findings Targeting of Religious Spaces Places of worship have become predictable and vulnerable targets, particularly in rural and peri-urban communities lacking security presence. Emergence of a Ransom Economy Around Worship The structured reduction of ransom demands—from ₦1 billion to ₦20 million—demonstrates the normalisation of economic exploitation of religious communities, transforming worshippers into financial assets for armed groups. Failure of State Protection Mechanisms Across all documented cases, common factors include: These constitute a systemic failure of the state’s duty to protect. De Facto Restriction of Religious Freedom Although no formal prohibition exists, fear has imposed practical limitations on worship, including: This reflects a transition from legal freedom to constrained practice. Accountability, Justice, and Public Transparency While some arrests have been made in connection with attacks on worshippers, it is essential that these cases proceed to timely and thorough prosecution. Perpetrators must face appropriate legal consequences, and outcomes should be publicly communicated. Visible justice not only strengthens deterrence but also rebuilds public confidence in the state’s ability to protect vulnerable communities. Analysis: Freedom of Religion Under Threat The situation in Nigeria reflects a critical shift: freedom of religion is constitutionally guaranteed but operationally compromised. The consistent targeting of worshippers by non-state actors, combined with inadequate state response, constitutes a violation of Nigeria’s obligations under international human rights law. The state’s inability to secure places of worship, particularly in rural areas, amounts to a failure of due diligence, as defined under international human rights standards. Recommendations We respectfully urge the UN Special Rapporteur to: Engage the Government of Nigeria on the Rural Protection Policy Call for a National Protection Framework Encourage Nigeria to establish a National Rural and Religious Site Protection Policy, including: Promote Accountability Mechanisms Support Early Warning and Community Protection Systems Conclusion The evidence presented demonstrates that in Nigeria, the right to worship is increasingly exercised under conditions of fear, coercion, and insecurity. The persistence of attacks on churches, through killings, abductions, and ransom extortion, reveals a structural gap between legal commitments and lived realities. Without urgent intervention, the continued erosion of security around religious practice risks transforming freedom of religion from a guaranteed right into a conditional and dangerous activity.orming freedom of religion from a guaranteed right into a conditional and dangerous activity.