— Paul Schlehlein
The audio version of this article is available here: YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
The organisation known as Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a violent, dangerous, Marxist movement. It is fiction, a sham, and a lie to believe that BLM really cares about black lives. Consider just two examples to support this claim: BLM’s outspoken support of abortion in the US and their deafening silence concerning the murder of black Christians around the world.
Abortion
BLM’s official position is that abortion access is a necessary component of racial justice. BLM states on their website that they were “infuriated” at the overturning of Roe, despite sixteen million black babies having been murdered by abortion in the U.S. since Roe began in 1973.
Black women account for a disproportionately higher percentage of abortions in the U.S., with some states reporting that black women account for more than 50% of the abortions. Black babies in Ohio, for example, are six times more likely to be aborted than white babies. Approximately 360,000 pre-born black babies are aborted every year, nearly one thousand per day. BLM applauds this.
According to a 2015 Policy Report, which addresses the effects of abortion on the black community, abortion is the leading cause of death for African Americans, more than all other causes combined, including AIDS, violent crimes, accidents, cancer, and heart disease.
Some stats in America, which don’t believe abortion is murder, say that heart disease is the leading cause of death among blacks in the U.S. Not true. It is abortion by a wide margin. Proverbs 24:11 commands the church to “rescue those being led away to death.” Instead, BLM encourages the opposite.
Black African Martyrs
Nigeria is the world’s epicentre for Christian martyrs, but you wouldn’t know it by BLM’s silence. BLM has given an official statement on Palestine, showing strong solidarity with the Palestinians, yet I could find no public statements from BLM about the ongoing genocide of black Christians in Nigeria. This should not surprise the church, since BLM is anti-Christian to the core.
Since 2009, over 50,000 Nigerian Christians have been murdered for their faith. In the first half of 2023, 2,500 Nigerian Christians were murdered by Muslim terrorists, including 134 in just one week. In 2024, 160 Christian girls were kidnapped in a single day.
In 2025 alone, well over 7,000 Nigerian Christians have been killed. In November of 2025, during a live-streamed church service in Eruku, Nigeria, Muslims shot up a church, killed several people, and kidnapped the pastor. This came just days after twenty-five girls were abducted from a nearby boarding school.
Recently, very public statements have come out against the murder of Christians in Nigeria and the slaughter of civilians in Sudan by Muslim terrorists. Did this disapproval come from Black Lives Matter? No. Were campus students marching around campus wearing Nigerian flags? No. Were CNN and the BBC keeping these crimes on the front page of their news outlets? No.
As smiling Islamists in Sudan shouted “Allahu Akbar” over the corpses of Christians, was Greta Thunberg crying for mercy or UN officials demanding justice? No. As traumatised Nigerian Christians spoke of babies being slaughtered like chickens and as Nigerian pastors begged for help while standing in a mass grave, has the world raised its voice in protest? No.
Instead, some of the only support has come from President Trump of the United States. For years, Nigeria had been a staple on the list of Countries of Particular Concern until President Biden removed it in 2021, despite Nigeria receiving the most Christian persecution for the past decade.
On October 31, 2025, President Trump designated Nigeria as a country of Particular Concern, joining twelve other countries, including Eritrea, Russia, China, and Iran. Every year, the US President evaluates each country of the world to determine which nations exhibit severe violations of religious freedom, including torture, forced disappearances, prolonged prison sentences and flagrant breaches of life and liberty. By doing this, the President publicly recognised the terror Nigerian Christians are facing.
Conclusion
So why don’t Christian Nigerian black lives matter? They do matter to the Lord Jesus Christ, who created them in his image and promises a martyr’s crown to those who persevere even to death (Rv. 2:10). They do matter to their brothers and sisters around the globe, who pray for them in their distress and send aid and missionaries to bear their burdens (Gal. 6:2).
But Christian Nigerian black lives do not matter to the world because organisations like BLM are antithetical to the Christian message. Scripture tells believers: “Do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you” (1Jn. 3:13). Jesus said: “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you” (Jn. 15:18).
As pilgrims on this earth, Christians must expect persecution, stand for the truth, and then pray for their fellow brothers that they would endure to the end.