The fact that the head, councils, and staff members of every Christian church disappeared (imagine the Vatican, totally empty) while the Imam’s of the world are still of the world… people will put 2+2 together pretty quickly. It would take, at most, 6 hours for the common link to be discovered.
Whether it’s accepted by everybody is another matter, true.
I also think the Islamic world would go freaking bananas - “Why not us?” 2 of the three branches of Abraham left facing each other with the third branch vanishing from their role of peacekeeper*. Yeah… it wouldn’t be pretty.
*For want of a better term. But Israel wouldn’t exist if the US (and, earlier, the USSR) didn’t agree in '47-48 that it was to exist.
The Americas is now quite empty, with a minimum of 70% of people gone. The USA’s breadbasket is now rotting, based on my anecdotal view of the heartland (and California’s central valley).
USA: The larger coastal cities will keep some population of course, but will be living off of canned goods for a few years while they adjust. The US Navy ships at sea will be scrambling with less than a skeleton crew. The US military in general is now a bunch of empty bases with a couple of guys running around. Power plants, food sources, etc. get hammered. Few people left to run the ports. Can enough of the military guys band together for a coup? Probably see the US break up, with a Western nation centered in California, and something to the East out of New York?
Europe loses more than half of their population as well I would think. Not sure what the numbers are there. Russia is gone too.
So now the remaining global superpower is China. #2 is whatever scrapes together in Europe. The non-Christian Germans, French and English probably band together to maintain a level of control.
You don’t think India, or the Arabian states, would be #2?
Russia’s an interesting one. It’s the nearest mostly-christian nation to China (and, looking at the map linked earlier, the only one China shares a border with) so if China does want to expand, that would be the obvious choice. But it would depend on how much Russia could hold itself together.
China would be number one, in my opinion. It’s already a major power and it would be relatively untouched. (There are around 14,000,000 Christians in China’s population of around 1,350,695,000.)
The number two power is less obvious. India would be a strong contender. But Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, and Pakistan are possibilities. Israel, Taiwan, and Vietnam are less likely candidates as each would be confronted by hostile neighbours. It would probably depend on the post-disappearance shifting of alliances, including who got the support of the remnant populations of Europe and the Americas.
The remnant population of the United States would probably be strong enough to hold on to North America. Losing around three quarters of the population would be a huge blow but the remaining quarter would still be a substantial population and they’d have the untouched nuclear arsenal to back them up. And geographic separation would give them enough time to get organized before other countries could send occupying forces. The United States might no longer be able to project its power around the world but it could defend itself at home.
Well, they’re rather attached for historical and emotional reasons to that particular piece of real estate.
But suppose they did come over here, after all the Christians disappeared. It wouldn’t really make much difference to the fate of the U.S., since there’s only 8 million Israelis, and there are ~70 million non-Christian Americans. But there’d certainly be plenty of room for them here.
I think we are assuming that France will surrender, but unlike other major powers they will lose less than half of their population, as just more than 50% are unbelievers and members of other religions.
I would personally bet against the continued existence of the U.S.A. if 3/4 of our population, across every walk of life, suddenly disappeared.
I mean, how’s it gonna work? The power plants are missing 3/4 of their workers. The food distribution chain, from farm to supermarket, ditto. No power means no communication, no Internet, no TV, no radio. The chain of communication connecting the White House to the missile silos undoubtedly has backups to backups with respect to power, but 3/4 of the people manning that chain, starting with the President and VP, are gone.
It would take awhile to put it all back together. You could scrape together enough skilled people from the remaining workers at several power plants to run one power plant, if people could communicate with each other over distances. But they can’t, because there’s no power.
By the time people start reassembling our world, there would have been no U.S.A. for awhile. There might not be one ever again.
Like I said, it would be a huge blow. But the United States had a population of 80,000,000 in 1900 so it is possible for the country to exist with that number.
Granted, the massive loss of population would be an issue but in pre-modern times diseases could wipe out a majority of a country’s population in a year and the country would survive.
And the loss of manpower would be somewhat mitigated by the surplus of material. America would have an economy that had supported 320,000,000 people now supporting only 80,000,000. If the GDP is reduced by half, it would still be producing twice as much on a per capita basis.
The numbers aren’t the problem. If we lost 3/4 of our population in a geographically distinct manner - say, the Northeast survives intact, but everyone else disappeared - we’d probably manage.
The problem is linkages. Our civilization is a very complex set of interdependencies. The links of those interdependencies would be sundered a hundred million times over.
Sure, in largely agrarian societies where each village in the countryside furnished its own necessities. And where nobody would be dumb enough to knowingly invade a country weakened by plague anyway.
We wouldn’t have an economy for a fair spell. And at such point as we did again, we wouldn’t be able to manage half the GDP even if we were organized afterwards because we wouldn’t have the people to man the means of production, distribution, communication, etc.
The one area where the surplus of resources would work in the survivors’ favor for awhile would be that most of your neighbors would be gone, but their refrigerators and pantries would be as full as they normally would, and the supermarkets would also be full, with only 1/4 the usual number of people to provide food to. But once that food ran out, where would more food come from? Most of the truckers would be gone, and most of the people writing the paychecks for the remaining truckers would be gone too - not that a ‘paycheck’ would have meaning because the banks wouldn’t have power. Hell, those green pieces of paper in our wallets would be of dubious value as well.
Also, where does more gasoline come from? The gas stations don’t have electricity; I suppose with a pump and a generator, you could get gasoline out of their underground tanks. Once that was gone, why would the remaining gasoline tank truckers refill them? If I was driving one of those rigs, and I got wind that 3/4 of the population had disappeared, I’d take that thing home and park it, so that at I and my family would at least have fuel.
Three & a half to seven years of Satan running the world through the Beast and the False Prophet (Revelation 13), after which Jesus comes back to reign on Earth for one thousand years, after which the Earth in transformed into, well, Heaven on Earth (Revelation 20-22). While a Jewish remnant of 144,000 are sealed by God for some mission, many more Jews-Israelites will be saved, as well as vast multitudes of Gentiles (Rev 7, 14, Romans 9-11).
So yeah, there is a major incentive to convert to Christianity. Now, if several years pass after Czarcasm’s event & no major AntiChrist is forthcoming, that will raise some questions. (Some dispensational preachers & writers suggest that there is nothing that would mandate the AntiChrist ascending to power a decade of more after the Rapture but it just wouldn’t seem right to me.)
The idea that you can’t run a modern economy with only eighty million people is absurd.
Have you ever heard of Canada? They’re a bigger country than the United States and they have a population of less than forty million people. But I’ve been to Canada - they have banks and gas stations and supermarkets that seem to function just fine.
Yes, it would be a huge disruption if a couple of hundred million people disappeared. But people are not anarchists by nature. The survivors would reorganize themselves and the economy would be redistributed and consolidated to the size of the new population.
Since the OP has said that children who are not professed Christians are still here there will be a lot of dead infants and pre-verbal toddlers in the first 2 – 4 weeks. There will be heroic efforts by many of the remaining people to save the children near them, however there will be way more infants and toddlers than can be helped especially in remote locations and locations where most of the adults are professed Christians. This will be a further psychological blow to the remaining people. This will add to the great problem of the remaining people for medical services. It is not that there are not enough non professing Christian medical personal, it is that said people are physically separated in many cases and they are physically separated from their patients. Soon there will be problems with gas and with power so getting the normal apparatus of modern medicine working will be problematic for the first few months, at least. There will be many plane crashes, car accidents, train derailments, etc. The first responders will be overwhelmed, since they also are going to be working understaffed. There are going to be a great deal of dead bodies (infants and toddlers and accident victims unable to get help) and decaying food around soon. Which will lead to something I have not seen motioned.
What would be happening to the fauna? I would expect a major increase in the rodent population even within the major cities that have kept a larger percentage of their population than 1 in 4. There will be great increase in rodents in the farmlands - both North and South America the farmlands have more professed Christians than the large cities. With more insects and rodents there will be more disease in the remaining human population. Roaming feral dogs, feral livestock, which leads to greater predator population will add to the difficulties of getting back to some semblance of the ability to get foodstuff to the urban centers that will want it.
An invasion by another country or countries might be welcomed if said invaders got the normal services back – more people to man the power plants, refineries and farms. People are used to certain convinces that were not available in previous centuries. Taking away those convinces as well as dealing with the psychological blows of visible death and “why wasn’t I taken/where did all the people go” may sap the will of the remaining people in the Americas.
Close to 100% of a trained population running a modern economy - 73% percent of that trained population = unmitigated disaster. The eighty million that are left will not just not be carrying on because, for the most part, they will have to have whoever is left in each job category retrain them in their new fields. It’s not like it’s going to be an even 73% loss across the board, you know.
Canada is able to do it because it is next door to the US. Canadian development would have been radically different if, say, England won the Revolutionary War or the French never sold Louisiana. And a post-Christian Canada would be in just as bad straits as the Americans.
While 67% of Canadians profess to be Christian, in the provence of Quebec the rate is 90%, pretty much wiping out most of the French-speaking members of the country.
but unlike other major powers they will lose less than half of their population, as just more than 50% are unbelievers and members of other religions.