YAOUNDÉ, Cameroon – As the persecution of Christians continues to define the news in Nigeria, members of the U.S. Congress has passed a resolution calling on the Trump administration to re-designate Africa’s most populous nation as a “Country of Particular Concern.”

The Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, presented House Resolution 220, which expresses “the need to designate Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern” (CPC) during a committee hearing on the matter March 12.

A CPC refers to a nation placed on a special watchlist due to “systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom” affecting its citizens.

Even as the March 12 hearing was taking place, Catholic Bishops in Nigeria released a report stating that within the past ten years, 145 priests were kidnapped. 11 of them were killed.

Smith, who has visited Nigeria several times, recounted what he heard and saw with regard to the persecution of Christians in Nigeria.

“In 2013, I visited Archbishop [Ignatius] Kaigama in Jos, Nigeria.  We visited churches, five of them, that had been recently firebombed by Boko Haram and spent hours listening to survivors tell their stories,” the congressman said in his opening remarks at the hearing.

“Despite their numbing loss and pain, I was absolutely amazed at the survivors’ deep faith, courage and resilience. They were not going to quit, but they were looking to their government for help and it was not coming,” he continued.

“I also met with an evangelical believer named Habila Adamu. Dragged from his home by Boko Haram terrorists, he was ordered to renounce his faith. With an AK-47 pressed to his face, he was asked ‘are you ready to die as a Christian.’  With extraordinary courage Habila answered, ‘yes, I am ready to die as a Christian.’ He was asked a second time and he repeated his answer. His wife was pleading –  ‘please don’t kill my husband.’ And yet he said, ‘yes I am ready to die as a Christian.’ This time, the terrorist pulled the trigger.  A bullet ripped through Habila’s face.  He crumpled to the ground, bleeding profusely, left for dead. By some miracle, he survived,” Smith said.

The congressman said he eventually invited Habila to share his story with U.S. lawmakers and he told the sub-committee that he was alive because “God wants you to have this message—knowing Christ is so much ‘deeper’ than merely knowing Boko Haram’s story of hate and intolerance.”

Habila then implored the US to “do everything you can to end this ruthless religious persecution…but know Christ first.”

Yet, the situation has only gotten worse, according to Bishop Wilfred Anagbe of Makurdi in Nigeria’s Benue State.

Brought in as a key witness at the March 12 House hearing, the Nigerian bishop gave details of what it is like to be a Christian in a country that is nearly evenly divided between Christians and Muslims.

“Nigeria and eventually my diocese and the State of Benue have become in recent years one of the most dangerous and insecure places for Christians,” the Nigerian bishop stated.

“Islamist extremists are fiercely contesting the possession, control and governing law of the land, especially in the country’s northern and central regions, the latter of which is where Benue is located,” he said.

He spoke about “a long-term Islamic agenda to homogenize the population” which he claimed has been implemented over several presidencies through a strategy “to reduce and eventually eliminate the Christian identity of half of the population.”

“This strategy includes both violent and non-violent actions such as the exclusion of Christians from positions of power and adoption of church members, the raping of women, the killing and expulsion of Christians, the destruction of churches and farmlands of Christian farmers, followed by the occupation of such lands by the Fulani herders, and also changing the names of these villages. They are taking all the places, so you clearly see an expansionist approach and Islamic culture, and then they are making the people now flee and leave their villages and conquer it,” Anagbe said.

The bishop spoke about the Fulani herdsmen who have been dispossessing Christian farming communities of their farmlands.

“The greatest threat facing Christians in Nigeria today are the jihadists, camouflaged as Fulani herdsmen,” said Emeka Umeagbalasi, the board chair of the Catholic–inspired NGO, International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law, Intersociety.

“They come to destroy. They come to pillage,” Emeka told Crux.

“They are engaged in acts of savagery-acts that are not only against the order of nature, but are unspeakable and abominable. Imagine Fulani Jihadists taking their captives into the forest, and engaging in same-sex sexual violence by way of a man raping his captive man. After raping his captive man, he will go again and rape his captive woman. And after that, he will start inserting objects, including sticks into the anus of the victim,” he explained.

The Makurdi bishop accused the Nigerian government of complicity in the face of Christian persecution, noting that while the abductions and killings go on, the security forces seem to look the other way.

“The experience of the Nigerian Christians today can be summed up as that of a Church under Islamist extermination,” Anagbe said.

“It is frightening to live there,” he added.

“We live in fear because at any point it can be our turn to be killed, but to remain silent is to die twice. So, I have chosen to speak,” the bishop said.

With the situation worsening by the day, Anagbe called on the U.S. government to re-designate Nigeria as a “CPC” because this would show that the US cares about what’s happening to Christians in Nigeria.

President Donald Trump’s first administration designated Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern in 2020, but Secretary of State, Antony Blinken inexplicably removed Nigeria from that list a year later, sparking outrage among the Christian community in the African nation.