Abstract
Although there are several provisions within the Nigerian legal framework that, however, address the issue of church attack, the state capacity to implement effective constitutional sanctioning on perpetrators of this heinous crime has always been found wanting or completely absent, leading to countless religious attacks on churches with seeming state consent. This study employs semi-structured interviews to draw data from affected families from Benue and Enugu States, Nigeria. The article explored their experiences. The study participants were recruited through snowball sampling technique, and data were analysed thematically. The respondents stated that church killings or killing of Christians is rising because of the fact that perpetrators stand lower risk of detection and apprehension than other crimes. Also respondents interrogated that justification for the crime is land acquisition and religious intolerance. On the persistence of the challenge, all the 13 respondents stated that the crime seems to have state approval that has made it seemly impossible to tackle. The article calls for continuous inter-religious dialogue and intentional governmental responsibility in protecting lives of all persons living within the geographical enclave of Nigeria which is necessary for the common good. Closer understanding of other faiths and religions will help build bridges of peace and tolerance. The article also calls for the need to promote African traditional values, such as the value of sacredness of life, human respect and good neighbourliness. Contribution: This study initiated the discussions that will help the public understand the reason for continuous church attacks in Nigeria, what church crime connotes in the Nigerian context and its uniqueness from other crimes. These discussions sit quite well within the transdisciplinary religious perspective of this journal.
Highlights
The church is a sacred place where the Christians worship
In the sequence of things, crimes committed on church premises are different from every other crime perpetrated outside church premises; such unique differences are angled from social viewpoints, religious sanctity, sectarian genocide and retaliatory complications
A 30-year-old respondent, who shared the view of a rising trend, explained that the reason is that church crime has lower risk of detection and apprehension than other crimes
Summary
The church is a sacred place where the Christians worship. Christianity is one of the oldest religions in the world (Egbegi, Ajah & Ogbonnaya 2018; Okpa, Ajah & Okunola 2018). In February 2019, some Islamic herdsmen attacked a Catholic Parish in same Mbalom in Benue State and killed all worshippers in attendance for morning Mass or devotion, claiming that members of the Parish were responsible for converting hundreds of Moslems to Christianity (Chris 2019). Like the regular killing of Christians by Moslem locals in Jos (Morning Star News 2019) or the September 2018 burning of a pastor, his wife and three sons in their church building by a Moslem group in Plateau State (World Watch Monitor 2018). Each of these cases paints a summarised picture of common experiences in Nigerian churches. The interview data were used as the empirical input for data analysis
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