I get a chuckle out of a bumper sticker I occasionally see that says, “Walmart: Your source for cheap plastic crap.” You know what I’m talking about: The $5 laundry hamper, the $8 bedside lamp, the deluxe $15 electric grill and the lawn-mower that, somehow, costs less than a day’s wages and has a half-life of approximately 40 hours.
The availability of cheap technology has been changing the world for a long time. The printing press took books from rare to common almost overnight and revolutionized communication. Radio did the same thing a hundred years ago, but I had not realized how much that even way back then its success hinged on, wait for it… cheap consumer imports from Asia. As I mentioned in an earlier post, some of these things have been going on for a lot longer than we realize.
Here is an interesting account from about 1940 where a Christian missionary is discussing his master plan for radio:
Why should we not broadcast the message of the kingdom of God? Our missionary friends in South America have seized this opportunity and the “Voice of the Andes” is heard all over the South American Continent, and its messages go out in language after language.
A Chinese friend sad down with us and, with the map of China on the table before us, he showed that he had as real a vision as had Hudson Taylor of China’s need. Only, Taylor knew nothing of the facilities that were before this man. he told how he had bought an hour on the wireless station at Shanghai and how widely his message had got out. he also told how he bought another hour and another hour, until he had eight hours a day, with missionaries on the air who knew how to tell the Gospel message. He had seen such results that on this map of China before us he had it all laid out with power stations covering the whole land. We would gladly have given everything we had to build one of those stations by which one could reach a mission souls.
The next part is the most interesting:
Then this friend said to us, “Our enemies, the Japanese, are out to undersell the world, to make the cheapest things that can be made, to undercut with their merchant navy the goods from every other country.” And he went on, “We are out to use our enemies for the furtherance of the Gospel. They have invented a cheap receiving-set at the small cost of forty cents by which one can listen to these messages anywhere. We can put them on the street, we can fix them in any kind of hall, and our Chinese people, however illiterate, may listen in to the message.”
-Rowland Bingham, Seven Sevens of Years and a Jubilee, p.122
We can broadcast our message, but nobody can listen to it. Solution? Cheap crap to the rescue! It’s perpetually both a curse and a blessing.
True story: My father used to be a ham radio enthusiast. We had a lot of nice gear including a 2000 watt amplifier. But one day he gave it away. Where did it go? We gave it to a missionary friend of ours that broadcast a pirate Christian radio station in Farsi into Iran from a secret (and moving) location. I wonder if it’s still humming today?