The Burning of Churches and the Erasure of a People: Banyamulenge Christians, the Congo, and the Moral Economy of Silence

Why some atrocities become global causes while others are permitted to disappear

A destroyed church in a rural area, with charred remains indicating recent destruction, surrounded by people gathered in mourning. The scene highlights the themes of faith, loss, and the pressing issue faced by Banyamulenge Christians in the Congo.

There are moments when the destruction of buildings must be read not as incidental violence, but as the attempted annihilation of a people. The recent attacks on Banyamulenge Christian communities in Uvira, in the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are such a moment. Churches were not caught in the crossfire. They were selected, targeted, and destroyed alongside homes and communal structures. Their ruin was not collateral. It was communicative.

What was communicated was unmistakable: that a people may be deprived not only of land and security, but of the sacred institutions through which it knows itself, remembers itself, and persists.

Yet there is a second, more insidious reality revealed by these events. It is not only that churches have been burned. It is that their burning has not commanded the attention one might expect in an age that speaks so frequently—and so confidently—of human rights, minority protection, and religious freedom. The deeper crisis, therefore, is not only local. It is civilisational. It concerns the moral economy of attention: who is seen, who is heard, and who is permitted to vanish without consequence.

On 18 January 2026, following renewed fighting in South Kivu after the withdrawal of M23 forces, churches and faith-based organisations belonging to the Banyamulenge community were reportedly destroyed by army-aligned forces and local militias. More than seventy homes were razed. Civilians were killed. Survivors were displaced into an already unstable humanitarian landscape. What remained was not merely physical devastation, but the systematic dismantling of a community’s capacity to gather, worship, and live in continuity with its past.

To grasp the significance of this, one must understand the Banyamulenge. They are not a transient or recent population, but a long-established Tutsi-origin community in the highlands of eastern Congo. Yet for decades they have been treated as strangers in their own land—accused of foreign allegiance, entangled in the aftershocks of the Rwandan Genocide, and repeatedly subjected to cycles of suspicion, displacement, and violence.¹ Their identity has made them vulnerable. Their Christianity has made them visible. Together, these have made them expendable.

It is precisely this combination that renders the destruction of churches so revealing. A church is not merely a religious structure. It is the locus of communal coherence. It is where memory is stabilised, where moral formation occurs, and where the individual is situated within a narrative that transcends the immediate contingencies of conflict. To destroy it is to attempt to sever a people from its own continuity.

Sean Nelson, Senior Counsel for Global Religious Freedom at ADF International, has observed that such attacks leave communities unable “to worship, gather and live out their faith.” This is accurate, but insufficient. For what is removed is not only the ability to worship, but the framework within which a community understands why worship matters. The effect is not merely disruption. It is disintegration.

A legal response has now been initiated. On 11 March 2026, a case supported by ADF International was filed before the East African Court of Justice, supported by affidavits from church leaders and witnesses to the destruction. Counsel for the Banyamulenge, Innocent Nteziryayo, has rightly insisted that reconstruction must include not only homes, but “the churches and organisations that sustain their spiritual and communal life.” This is a necessary claim, and a just one.

But law operates within a wider cultural environment. And it is here that the most troubling dimension of the crisis emerges.

For the events in Uvira do not exist in a vacuum of information. They have been reported. They have been documented by organisations such as Human Rights Watch, which has detailed looting, destruction, and violence against civilians and infrastructure in the region.² They have been raised before international courts. They have been articulated by advocacy groups. And yet, they have not entered the bloodstream of global moral concern.

They have not become a cause.

And here the question must be asked plainly: why?

It is not because the facts are unavailable. Nor is it because the event lacks severity. Entire communities displaced. Churches destroyed. A minority targeted on ethnic and religious grounds. By any serious moral or legal standard, this constitutes precisely the kind of event that should command sustained international attention.

The more plausible explanation is less comfortable. It is that the contemporary media environment operates according to an implicit hierarchy of attention—one in which certain narratives are elevated and others quietly deprioritised. Conflicts that can be readily integrated into dominant ideological frameworks are amplified, given symbolic weight, and revisited in cycles of commentary. Those that resist such integration—because they are complex, unfashionable, or implicate inconvenient realities—are reported once and then allowed to recede. Editorial judgement, not mere accident, determines which crises are sustained and which are allowed to dissipate.

The pattern is not theoretical; it is observable. Major Western outlets such as BBC News and The Guardian routinely devote sustained, multi-cycle coverage to conflicts that align with prevailing narratives. By contrast, crises such as that affecting the Banyamulenge rarely receive comparable continuity of attention. When they do appear, they are subsumed into broader conflict summaries, stripped of their specific religious dimension, and quickly displaced. The disparity is not in the availability of facts, but in the persistence of focus.

This is not a claim of conspiracy. It is a claim of structure.

The Banyamulenge Christians of eastern Congo satisfy few of the conditions that drive sustained coverage. Their history is complex. Their identity is contested. Their persecution does not map neatly onto simplified moral binaries. They are, in short, difficult to narrate. And in an age that depends upon narrative clarity for moral mobilisation, difficulty becomes invisibility.

This is the essence of selective silence. It is not the absence of reporting, but the absence of emphasis. It is the difference between an event that is noted and one that is remembered; between a crisis that is recorded and one that is ritualised. In this sense, silence is not merely the lack of speech. It is the absence of consequence.

The implications are profound. For if the language of human rights is to retain credibility, it must be applied with consistency. If the destruction of places of worship is an outrage in one context, it must be an outrage in all. If the displacement of a religious minority demands response in one region, it must demand response in another. To do otherwise is to transform universal principles into instruments of selective advocacy.

The response of the international community to eastern Congo has long been characterised by a combination of humanitarian concern and strategic fatigue. Reports are issued. Statements are made. Aid is delivered. But the deeper structural issues—ethnic fragmentation, militia proliferation, weak state authority—persist with little resolution.³ Within this environment, targeted attacks on minority communities can occur with a degree of predictability that is itself an indictment.

The responsibility of the Congolese state is therefore clear: to prevent further violence, to protect vulnerable populations, and to support the reconstruction of destroyed religious and communal infrastructure. Failure to do so cannot be excused indefinitely by reference to complexity. Complexity may explain difficulty; it does not justify inaction.

But beyond the state lies a broader question—one that concerns the West, its institutions, and its self-understanding. For the selective application of moral concern is not a neutral phenomenon. It shapes perception. It determines which lives are seen as emblematic and which are treated as peripheral. It creates, in effect, a moral map in which some regions are illuminated and others remain in shadow.

Eastern Congo has long existed in such shadow.

From a theological perspective, the pattern is familiar. The Church has always understood that persecution rarely begins with overt extermination. It begins with marginalisation, with the erosion of communal structures, and with the gradual normalisation of absence. A Church need not be outlawed to be erased; it need only be deprived of the means to exist publicly.

The destruction of churches in Uvira is therefore not an isolated event, but part of a recognisable sequence. It is the removal of the visible signs of a people’s presence. It is the weakening of its capacity to endure. It is, in its own way, an attempt at erasure.

And yet, history also offers a counterpoint. Churches have been destroyed before, and rebuilt. Communities have been scattered, and regathered. The persistence of the Church does not depend upon the goodwill of states or the attention of media. But the suffering of her members does demand recognition, justice, and, where possible, intervention.

The question, then, is not whether the Banyamulenge Christians will endure. It is whether their endurance will be met with solidarity or with indifference.

If their churches are rebuilt, it will be an act of defiance against the logic of erasure. If their destruction is ignored, it will be a confirmation of it.

For the greatest danger is not only that churches are burned, but that their burning no longer compels a response. In such a world, silence is not neutral. It is the final stage of abandonment—and a world that grows accustomed to such silence will, in time, find it has nothing left to say when the same logic is applied closer to home.

¹ Gérard Prunier, Africa’s World War (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 52–78.
² Human Rights Watch, 2026 reporting on Uvira violence.
³ International Crisis Group, The Kivus: The Forgotten Crucible of the Congo Conflict.
⁴ UN OHCHR, DRC Human Rights Report, 2025–2026.
⁵ ADF International, March 2026 case filing.

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