The Advocate

Nigeria Is Back on the List. Now Comes the Hard Part.

In late October 2025, President Trump announced that the United States was designating Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern, the sharpest instrument in American religious freedom law. The announcement ended a long asking: the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom had recommended it every year since 2009.

The term comes from the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. A CPC is a government that has, in the language of the law, "engaged in or tolerated" what the statute calls "systematic, ongoing, [and] egregious violations of religious freedom." It is a short list, and Nigeria has been on it once before. The State Department designated Nigeria in December 2020, then removed it in November 2021. The killing did not pause to match the paperwork. In the year covered by the Open Doors 2026 World Watch List, 3,490 of the 4,849 Christians killed worldwide for their faith died in Nigeria. Roughly seven of every ten.

So the question this column was assigned, whether Washington should put Nigeria back on the list, has been overtaken by the answer. The harder question arrived within three weeks, when gunmen attacked worshippers at Christ Apostolic Church in Kwara State and bandits abducted 25 girls from a boarding school in Kebbi State.

America has said the words. What are the words for?

Everyone Says Arizona Saved the Confessional. Read the Holding. It Did Something Larger.

A unanimous Arizona Supreme Court did not rule that confession is privileged. It ruled that no judge or jury may ask whether a clergy member read his own doctrine correctly. That is a much larger rule.

Engraving of a gavel at rest on its block beside a bound volume of case reports and a furled document tied with a crimson ribbon.

A Texas Judge Just Declined to Take the Posters Down. He Did Not Say They Were Lawful.

A denied temporary restraining order is not a ruling on the merits. The hearing that matters is August 17, and the standard at stake is one Texas Christians wrote for themselves.

New York Did Not Lose in Court. It Agreed to Wait.

The July 30 order protecting four orders of Catholic nuns was entered by consent. That distinction is the whole story.

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