Confort Moderne sermon

Address by Rev. Chris Korda at the opening of her exhibition The (Wo)Man of the Future at Confort Moderne in Poitiers, France, on June 10, 2022.

Video is HERE

“It takes a village to raise a child.” En Français, “Il faut un village pour élever un enfant.” This proverb means that for a child to flourish, an entire community of people must nurture that child.

It took a village to raise this exhibition, first and foremost our excellent curators Anthony Stephinson and Coralie Ruiz, in cooperation with Yann Chevalier, Blandine, Pastor Kim, Lydia Eccles, Norah Burch, Cardinal Jardin, and many others. I am deeply indebted to all of them for their hard work and perseverance, despite many obstacles. But more deeply, I am grateful to them for caring about my art, and nurturing it, so that it could develop more fully and impact more people’s lives. I am truly blessed to reside in such a talented and ambitious village.

It also took a village to raise the Church of Euthanasia. And it still does, because the church is still growing and changing, even after thirty years. In the 1990s, the church prophesied that humanity’s consumption and waste would overshoot far beyond earth’s carrying capacity, causing climate change, ecological collapse, and mass extinction. This prophecy came true, though of course I would have preferred we were wrong. Sadly, the church is more vindicated and relevant every day. Since the church was founded, the human population has increased by more than a third. The ideas we advocated and popularized, including antihumanism, antinatalism, and voluntary population reduction, all of which seemed bizarre in the 1990s, are now front-page mainstream news. More importantly, because our warnings went unheeded, the collapse of civilization is no longer a remote possibility, but an imminent near-certainty. Humanity not only refuses to deviate from its relentlessly self-destructive path, but incredibly continues to accelerate into the catastrophe. CO2 and other greenhouse gasses continue to accumulate in the atmosphere, Earth’s temperature exceeds the tolerable range, forests dry out and burn, and sea level continues to rise. As I said on “Apologize to the Future,” “From the coast we must retreat.” As I said thirty years ago, the population will be reduced, the only question is, how humanely? And as I said thirty years ago, people are stupid, and that’s why there should be, and will be, less of them.

“If you dream alone, it’s just a dream; if you dream together, it’s reality.”

We dreamed of restoring balance between humans and non-humans. This dream was the child in our metaphor. The village has done everything it could to raise that child, to nurture it to adulthood and achieve our dream of a sustainable future. Our work continues. I thank everyone in the village for their efforts. And for those supremely enlightened individuals who took and upheld our sacred vow of non-procreation, I thank you for not breeding.

[A recitation of the Church of Euthanasia's Prayer for a Good Death follows.]

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