As dusk fell deep in a forest of mango and palm trees, Jaime Jeremias Matsimbe sat on the rose-colored dirt and hand-cranked a shortwave radio, looking for the word of God.
He wound the little plastic handle round and round, charging the radio like winding a watch, and soon a preacher’s voice boomed across a courtyard filled with goats and turkeys. Twenty miles from the nearest paved road, Matsimbe smiled as he listened to a Texas preacher’s sermons about Jesus and Saint Paul, translated into a local language spoken only in the southern African backcountry.
“I love that this person has brought us this message,” said Matsimbe, 59, a farmer with 24 grandchildren, whose native language, Xitshwa, is spoken by only a million or so people. “It makes us feel like there is somebody who cares for us.”
From the forests of Africa to the deserts of Mongolia and the Middle East, there have never been more religious radio networks and stations broadcasting more programming in more languages to more places. While the globalization of faith has increasingly been driven by the Internet and satellite television, religious radio broadcasters are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on one of the world’s oldest methods of mass communication.
“In the developing world, many people find that radio is about the only mechanism that is available,” said Robert Fortner, a specialist in religious broadcasting and director of the U.S.-based Media Research Institute. “They hang on to it the way people hang on to a life raft after a tsunami.”