By now, most people in my country (the U.S.) are aware of the havoc wreaked by climate change. For those who object to that terminology, we can at least agree that the U.S. is now among the parts of the world being hit by weather crises.
Other threats loom on the horizon as well. Many of these at the moment remain just what-if’s, but they are sobering enough to invite attention.
Some intelligence experts warn that a government hostile to the U.S. (North Korea being suggested most often) could launch high-altitude EMPs (electromagnetic pulse weapons). In the worst-case scenario, just three successful, precisely placed ones would knock out the country’s power grid. That means that water purification plants would no longer work. Nor would water be pumped for irrigating crops. Communications would collapse, as would the infrastructure. Some estimate that within a year or two, due to limited food and water access, 90 percent of the US would be dead. Technology allows remarkable progress, but total dependence on it exposes a key vulnerability. Thank God for the Amish!
EMPs are currently theoretical and their actual efficacy is highly debated. Not debated is that nuclear war among heavily weaponized states (especially the US, China and Russia) would eradicate life even more quickly and widely. Mutual annihilation provides a powerful disincentive for engaging in nuclear war, but the effectiveness of this disincentive presupposes that leaders controlling such weapons are sane. Given the past century’s record of leaders (least controversially, Adolf Hitler), sanity has hardly been a universal prerequisite for high office.
For what my uneducated guess might be worth, the northern hemisphere would suffer the most directly and quickly, with the possible exception of a few well-prepared elites with deep underground bunkers. The environmental effects would devastate poor rural farmers in Africa, but they would have now some advantages over the global north: few direct hits, less dependence on pure technology and infrastructure, and being generally closer to food sources.
A generation ago, some Christians in the U.S. almost took for granted that we are exempt here from massive natural disasters (such as tsunamis and devastating earthquakes) on the scale that has ravaged some regions such as Indonesia, Iran or Pakistan. Some seemed to assume that a Christian heritage exempted us from this. (The 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which killed an estimated 30,000 people, and the medieval Black Plague, which killed a third of Europe, happened a long time ago. For that matter, most Americans don’t remember the 1871 Chicago fire that left 100,000 homeless or the 1906 earthquake that destroyed 80 percent of San Francisco, either.) But India and China have more churchgoing Christians than does the U.S. right now, and the proportion of Christians is much higher in most of Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa than in the U.S. or (certainly) Canada.
That would not mean total peace for our brothers and sisters in the Global South, of course, even apart from a drastic impact on the environment. Religious minorities, usually including Christians, are already under pressure in many parts of Asia right now, whether from governments or from some individuals, not least in India, China, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Iran. (Apologies to North Korea for the lack of mention, but right now it may be too far beyond the others to be mentioned in the same repression chart.)
Nonjihadist Africans are already facing massive jihadist attacks in, for example, northern Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Congo-DRC, Mozambique, and elsewhere. Such attacks have already displaced about a million people in Mozambique.
I spent much of three summers in Plateau State, Nigeria, in the late 1990s. One friend there had been a church leader in a town further north and survived a massacre of other pastors only because his Muslim neighbor had defended him. A number of pastors I taught in Nigeria were subsequently displaced or even killed. One of my students survived three days in a church under siege with no water and a dead body. The same week in 2001 when the U.S. lost 3000 citizens in an attack on the Twin Towers, jihadist attacks and locals’ counterattacks in Plateau State inaugurated a year of thousands of violent deaths there. Before anyone talked about Boko Haram, I was publicly warning of the jihadist-driven warfare there, though some dismissed my warning as mere Christian “bias.” My wife Médine, just recently escaped from war herself, had to talk me out of returning to Plateau, since I was thinking that dying with my friends there might at least get some outside attention.
In these past three months of 2023, jihadist-armed herders have killed more than three hundred people in Plateau State, Nigeria, alone. (Who’s supplying them the weapons, by the way? Automatic weapons aren’t usually home made.) A friend who has lost friends in the attacks points out that a number of herders have now confiscated homes of farmers who died or have fled. That sounds a lot more like murder and theft than merely generic “conflict.” Prayerfully the new government, which inherited this crisis from its predecessor, will be able to restore some stability.
Shifting from present crises to a very speculative what-if: China has been observing and learning from Russian setbacks in Ukraine, so if China were to invade Taiwan by force it might be a stealthy lightning strike. (China’s crackdown in Hong Kong have not aided its efforts to woo Taiwan over.) Taiwan’s fall would have serious regional implications. If it happened virtually overnight, however, hopefully this would provide good reason to avoid rushing into World War 3. Given the survival prospects for a nuclear war, even kicking the can down the road for a generation extends a bit more longevity than finishing it all at once. Other what-if scenarios could be multiplied.
If all this does not sound grim enough to ruin your dinner, keep in mind that apart from any matters of global distress, time is running out on our individual clocks. If medical technology can repair our telomeres, perhaps old age will not do us in. But sooner or later something will! That is why all of us, in currently rich nations or currently poor ones, whatever our kinds of governments, need to be ready for the condition that lasts forever, beyond the rise or fall of any nation-state.
At the cost of the life of his own Son Jesus, God our creator has offered us eternal life, by Jesus’s death and resurrection. While we are wise to work for peace and justice and address current crises, wisdom cannot stop with the short term. Let the wise invest wisely for eternal dividends: our eternal hope is Jesus Christ. Those who trust in him have a bright future forever. And those of us who genuinely believe in the hope Christ has guaranteed for us can face this world’s bad news, praying and finding the courage to work to make the world better until Jesus returns with the new world he promised.
If you don’t have hope, current conditions and further what-if’s might make you want to throw in the towel. But with hope we can meet this world’s challenges with courage, because 2000 years ago, Jesus won the victory over the most daunting enemy ever: death itself.
