Empowering the Dis-empowered

I was recently shocked when I read about JCPenny selling t-shirt that suggested to young girls that being pretty and being smart are mutually exclusive. I was horrified that you girls and boys for that matter might take this message to heart. This got me thinking a lot about the kinds of messages we send by the things that we say and the things we do not say.

In the case of the JCPenny t-shirt many people spoke up and JCPenny did pull the t-shirt. My question is however is simply speaking up against this t-shirt, while the right thing to do, enough? The reality is the misogynistic expressed by this t-shirt is a part of the cultural zeitgeist, how then can we become active and not just reactionary against this injustice? The truth is that we need to have the courage to be continually putting out a message that says "You are not limited by what society tells you that you can be. You have the ability to the the thing that makes you most whole, that makes you fully human!" Yes, we do need to speak against the negative message, but just as important is the work of empowering, loudly proclaiming the positive message.

As a religious leader I am particularly concerned about this within the sphere of the church. For many years our scripture and faith have been wrongly used to limit people's potential, to dis-empower rather than empower. This means it is all the more important that we take on the call of God to let people know that God calls them to be the thing that makes them whole, fully human. That we want them to be empowered and we want to help them to break through the walls that keep them from being fully and authentically themselves.

We must do much more than say it as the church however, we must embody it. Just saying it does no good if our own structures continue to mirror those of the wider society. As long as there are those those are excluded we can speak of it all we want and it will ring hollow. We must follow the example of Jesus and draw the circle wider, giving human dignity and empowerment to those he met without that power, while challenging those with the power about their structures of dis-empowerment. The truth is as the church in America we must recognize that we are the ones with the power, so the scary (though I believe exciting) thing about being real about empowerment is that to do it we are going to have to be open to change.

This empowerment is an active pursuit in our society, because empowerment is not the status quo. It is counter-cultural to empower. We must begin to help raise each raise one another up, instead of looking down on those who have no one to give them a boost. Silence is simple not good enough as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King said " In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."