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~A happy third day of Christmastide to you. Waking on Boxing Day to hear that President Trump had dispatched the USAF across the Atlantic to take out the compounds of "scum", I naturally assumed he was referring to 10 Downing Street:
A teacher in an English school was accused of posing a risk to children and referred to the Government's counter-terrorism programme after showing Donald Trump videos to his US politics class...
Henley College, a sixth-form in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, with more than 2,000 students, reported the politics lecturer to the local child safeguarding authority, which concluded a referral to Prevent, the Government's counter-terrorism programme, was a "priority".
The teacher was accused of causing his A-level students, aged 17 and 18, "emotional harm". In one document, seen by the Telegraph, local officials in charge of child protection suggested the showing of the videos could amount to a "hate crime".
England cannot be saved short of violent revolution. Fortunately for Sir Keir and any Slav twinks on the premises, the Trump bombers were diverted south to Nigeria to hit Isis camps that have been targeting Christians.
It is somewhat dispiriting to me that the crisis of Nigerian Christians still comes as breaking news to the west when some of us were talking about it (all together now) twenty sodding years ago. Me in America Alone with a round-up of that year's news from the Anglican Communion:
In 2005, the big story in America was the Episcopal Church's first openly gay bishop; in Britain, the nomination of a celibate gay bishop; in Canada, New Westminster's decision to become the first diocese in the Anglican communion to perform same-sex ceremonies. In Nigeria, where on any Sunday the Anglicans in the pews outnumber those in America, Britain and Canada combined, the Archbishop is understandably miffed that the only news he gets from head office revolves around various permutations of gayness. Getting a reputation as a cult for upscale western sodomites and a few attendant fetishists doesn't help when half your country's in the grip of sharia and the local Islamoheavies are just itching to torch your churches.
In October the King and his UK prime minister decided to appoint as Archbishop of Canterbury a woman. The English yawned; the Nigerians did not take it half so blithely:
BREAKING NEWS: The Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion) has declared spiritual independence from the Church of England, rejecting the appointment of Bishop Sarah Mullally as the new Archbishop of Canterbury.
— Nigeria Stories (@NigeriaStories) October 6, 2025
Stating her support for same-sex marriage and her elevation as the... pic.twitter.com/7jHRisHdzC
It takes courage to be a Christian in Nigeria, and that courage deserves better than the modish twerpery of Canterbury (and increasingly Rome). Why it should be Trump's job - rather than the Archbishop's or the Pope's - to speak up for Nigerian Christians is a mystery, but no doubt it would harsh their respective gay and climate mellows. Still, a random sampling just from this year's Advent:
December 1st: Gunmen abduct pastor and bride in Nigeria
December 7th: Two slain in church shooting in southeast Nigeria
December 15th: 'Bandits' kidnap worshippers during church service in Nigeria
December 17th: A Roar of Motorcycles and the Terrifying Night of a Mass Kidnapping
December 25th: Gunmen Shoot Catholic Priest in Nigeria's Imo State on Christmas Eve
On and on and on. Me again twenty sod-bollocking years ago:
In the Sixties, Nigeria lived under English Common Law; now, half of it's in the grip of sharia, and the other half's feeling the squeeze.
In the Fifties, Islam was the lead religion in Nigeria, ahead not only of Christianity but also of various indigenous faiths. But it was colonial Islam: the Mohammedans are only ever moderated by a dominating culture, be that British imperialism, Soviet Communism, the Indonesian dictatorship, and more idiosyncratic variants of cultural confidence, such as Saparmurat Niyazov in his one-man stan:
His legacy is the 'Ruhnama', the alleged spiritual tract he published in 2001. Its prose was barely workmanlike and barely Turkmenlike: it's what the Little Red Book would have been had Mao spent too much time with Deepak Chopra and Dr Phil. But it was raised immediately to equal status with the Bible and the Koran. It was hailed as 'The Answer To All Questions', including those for the driver's test. Ninety per cent of the population is Muslim, yet Turkmenbashi promoted himself to Prophet, and demanded the Ruhnama be displayed in every house of worship and kissed by all who enter therein. When the chief imam, Nasurallah Ibadullah, objected to what he regarded reasonably enough as an act of idolatry, he was arrested (along with other dissenting imams) and sentenced to twenty-three years in gaol.
One appreciates that none of the above moderating influences are terribly congenial to Americans, but, even so, the general wussified approach to cultural confidence taken by Bush-era Washington after 9/11 was remarkable.
So, after independence, northern Nigeria Islamised, while Christianity held its own and then, thanks to a high calibre of local vicars (ie, not like the Church of England's and the Episcopal Church's), accelerated in the Nineties until circa 2010 or so its numbers (approx three-quarters Anglican, one-quarter Catholic) more or less caught up with Islam.
And thus all the burning and shooting and kidnapping. "Diversity is our strength"? Not to the Mohammedans.
As you'll know if you heard our Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols, I am broadly Anglican by disposition. But, if that church has any kind of future, it does not lie with the dame in Canterbury and her all-gay-all-the-time clergy: already Africa accounts for some seventy per cent of the Anglican Communion.
As to Trump's bombing raids, an attack in defence of Nigerian Christians could hardly work out worse than the "Democracy-Whisky-Sexy" strategy of liberating all those Muslims panting for "our freedoms". It is these days a cliché that, if Trump were to hail a cure for cancer, Democrats would announce their support for massively expanding cancer. But initial press reports of the Christmas air raids played that gag for real. The BBC's early bulletins insisted that Trump had provided no "proof" that Nigerian Christians were under attack - although their own news coverage makes nonsense of that claim, and one notes that the Corporation does not impose a similar burden of proof when Starmer and Albanese start nancying on about "Islamophobia". Yet The Guardian managed to go the Beeb one better:
Parts of the US right have for years been amplifying claims that Christians face violence in Nigeria, a notion the US president has helped to encourage.
So now, like gun rights and more recently free speech, kidnapped black schoolgirls and dead black women is just some weird far-right fetish? Black Lives Matter? Yeah, maybe if you're "part of the US right"...
If you listen carefully to the tenor of leftie press coverage, you might also discern the next evolution of "diversity": Jews were long ago read out of progressive identity-group victimology; they only rate a mention when they're gunned down in Manchester or Bondi - and even then concerns about anti-Semitism have to be carefully balanced by concerns for "Islamophobia". But the Guardian/BBC types are moving on: it turns out there is a hierarchy within black people too, and in the conflicts to come black Muslims will have a surer purchase on their sympathies than black Christians.
Kemi Badenoch, a very lapsed Nigerian Anglican, might want to ponder that one.
~In this ninth year of The Mark Steyn Club, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and are still eager to be here as we cruise on towards our first decade. We thank you all. For more information on the Club, see here. A Steyn Club gift membership makes a great late Christmas present.