Unholy war

To attend midnight mass on Christmas Eve in parts of Nigeria is to take your life in your hands. For the last three years, Islamist militants have been attacking churches but last week, when gunmen moved on a church in Potiskum, they found the military waiting. On their retreat, they came across a smaller unprotected church in the nearby village of Peri and opened fire, killing the pastor and five parishioners. A separate attack on the First Baptist Church in the village of Maiduguri took Nigeria’s Christmas death toll to a dozen, and the overall casualties of its new sectarian war to 1,400.

There was no condemnation from London. The idea of Christians being persecuted is one that the Foreign Office seems to find confusing. The writer Rupert Shortt, in his brilliant book Christianophobia, refers to a ‘bien-pensant blind spot’ which the British authorities suffer when it comes to understanding religious tensions the world over.