In a country halfway across the world, Agnes remembers the song her dad taught her when she was scared. And that was most of the time. While American children can’t sleep because of invisible monsters, in Nigeria, the nightmares are real life. Would tonight be the night the men attacked, burning, shooting, and killing? “In those moments,” she remembers, “my dad sang to us, ‘God will never forsake us. God will never abandon us. Even when there is suffering and persecution, God will never leave us.’” It is the song of millions of sons and daughters now, passed down through the years of grief—the nation’s unofficial heirloom.

Like so much of Africa, Nigeria’s story is one of constant violence, suffering, and mourning. While the government looks away, tens of thousands of Christians have been massacred, buried in mass graves that have taken over miles of desolate countryside. At the hands of Boko Haram or the Fulani herdsman, armed gangs roam across the country—kidnapping, beheading, and setting on fire anyone in their path. Some are held hostage in terror camps, others are forced into brutal marriages against their wills, raped by so many men they don’t know who their babies’ fathers are.

It is, most people who have been there will tell you, worse than genocide. Fred Williams, a missionary to Nigeria, has pleaded with the West to intervene. “Since [2001], the attacks have been relentless, continuous,” he stressed. “[These are] stories of carnage and killing and horror. … Thousands are being killed,” he insists. “I’m constantly in those villages. I........

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