How far is it from Scotland to Nigeria?
That’s not a trivial question. You probably didn’t hear about it on the news, but a priest — Father Sylvester Okechukwu of Kaduna State, Nigeria — was kidnapped and murdered on Ash Wednesday. This isn’t out of the ordinary in Nigeria, with attacks regularly happening, especially on holidays like Christmas and Pentecost. Christians are targeted and killed nearly daily all around the world at the hands of Islamic terrorists and others, but it barely registers in secular media.
Vice President J.D. Vance spoke at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast recently, highlighting that he knew what some Nigerian priests have experienced. But these attacks aren’t limited to Africa. In his widely acclaimed address to the Munich Security Conference, Vance mentioned a car attack on Munich pedestrians a day earlier that killed a mother and her two-year-old daughter; that act, too, was apparently inspired by Islamic fundamentalism.
Vance’s primary concern, though, was less with personal safety than personal liberties, of the kind European political leaders — and for that matter, some American ones — are increasingly disregarding.
He specifically called out the Romanian government for annulling the results of a recent election and European Union officials for applauding that action, as well as German officials carrying out police raids against citizens who’d posted unpopular comments online. He drew attention to EU commissioners who threatened to shut down social media featuring content the government doesn’t approve of and to Sweden for convicting a Christian man for burning a copy of the Quran, following the murder of his friend for similar reasons.
The vice president also criticized British officials for charging and convicting a man, Adam Smith-Connor, who was praying silently more than 50 yards from an abortion clinic. And finally, Vance turned his focus to Scotland, where the government is warning citizens that, in certain areas, even praying quietly in their own homes might be considered a violation of the law. Scottish officials have gone so far as to encourage citizens to report any of their neighbors who might be guilty of a “thought crime.”
Understandably, Vance focused on European issues but also recognized that many within the Biden administration “encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth.” Examples abound of crackdowns on Americans’ viewpoints over the past few years. People were penalized for questioning the government’s Covid data or presented with heavy fines for praying in their cars in a church parking lot during the pandemic. Others — including elected officials — were banned from social media for supporting (or opposing) the wrong social cause or political candidate in recent elections.
Vance could have mentioned the officially supported (or ignored) attacks on those who opposed male athletes in women’s sports or provided pregnancy care and alternatives to abortion. Or he might have pointed out government efforts to tell churches who they can and can’t hire and parents what they can and can’t know about their children.
The previous administration’s attempts to silence Americans were mixed with misplaced priorities abroad, such as its determined refusal to acknowledge the brutal persecution of Christians around the world — particularly in Africa, and most especially in Nigeria. More than 18,500 places of Christian worship were reportedly destroyed there between 2009 and 2023, with thousands of people of faith every year being abducted and, in many cases, murdered by Islamic extremists.
One report has shown nearly 10,000 Christians being killed for their faith over the past two years in Nigeria, by far the deadliest country for Christians. And that’s likely an undercount.
It’s not a coincidence that the Western nations now growing increasingly dismissive of civil liberties like freedom of speech and religious liberty are also the countries least interested in or much bothered by — to judge from the lack of media coverage — the massacres of Christians in Africa. Contempt for individual freedom can only lead, in time, to contempt for life itself.
And, perhaps, vice versa. Is it a coincidence that the decades that have seen such an erosion of human rights are also the decades in which legalized abortion has taught so many to accept the casual killing of hundreds of thousands of children, year after year, in the womb?
So it is with free speech. So it is with religious freedom. Once you’re so intent on pushing forward your own agenda (religious, political, social, or personal) that you’re willing to bend the law to potentially arrest someone for praying silently in the privacy of his or her own home, it’s only a matter of time before you’re willing to silence that someone completely.
In A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More asks whether a man would be willing to “cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil.” That is the philosophy of censors and silencers. And they won’t stop at their imagined devils but go after angels and everyday people, too.
Perhaps we’re not quite there yet in America. But it’s not that far, from here to Scotland. And Scotland, nowadays, isn’t that far from Nigeria.
Jesus Christ is King
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