Bonus Sample: Post-Catholic Music (w/Julia Tucker)
Julia Tucker is a professional church organist in Savannah, Georgia. She grew up homeschooled in a TradCath home presided over by a father who is now a minor celebrity on the reactionary right. In this Listener Story, she discusses her long strange trip out of Catholic revanchism, the unexpected freedoms of homeschooling, sneaking around in sacristries, why she believes that figures like Bishop Strickland and the Catholics heading up Project 2025 are more ominous and effective than Evangelical leaders, how music began to displace religion for her, and why she’ll continue playing the organ in church.
Show Notes
Julia Tucker, Organist
Julia Tucker, Recital
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Hello everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And for this episode, maybe I'll add how church music might sometimes be an antidote to church nonsense.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram at ConspiritualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
We also have a book out, and rumors and reviews are that it's quite good.
And today marks a long-awaited return to our Listener Stories series, which is an ongoing project.
in discussing with listeners their entanglements with conspirituality and cults, how they got into them, how they managed the difficult but also unexpected things that happened along the way, and how they recovered to the extent that they have.
And today, I'm joined by Julia Tucker from Savannah, Georgia.
So, hello, Julia.
Welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast.
Hi, Matthew.
Thank you for having me on here.
So the elevator pitch on your bio is that in present tense, you are a professional organist at St.
Peter's Episcopal Church in Savannah.
And this really caught my eye because I had like my first career professionally was as a church organist from about the age of 17 to 27.
You know, and after that, I got into cults and then yoga, so maybe my life is a little bit of a cautionary tale.
I don't know how long you've been at it, but we can commiserate on that closer to the end.
But to start off, you said in our correspondence the following.
After 15 years of church work, I've seen some absolute shit go down in church, but I also have seen really beautiful examples of how church has offered support to people who struggle to find it elsewhere.
While I don't share the faith of the people in the pews, there are some shared values with progressive Catholicism and Christianity that I strongly feel.
So, I wanted to just ask as a quick position statement off the top, what would the three top values be in that zone for you?
And what made the church environments you've moved through good at holding them or maybe not holding them?
Yeah, I think I feel in a lot of ways that you can take the kid out of the church, but you can't take the church out of the kid.
And as I said, I'm not a believer, I'm not a theist, but I feel deeply shaped by my experiences growing up in church, my experiences working in church, and I feel a lot of overlap there in terms of the values. I think primarily I've
seen service as a kind of highly held value in the church environments I've
been part of. I've seen you know food pantries, homeless ministries, blood drives,
angel tree, Christmas presents, support for the parents of young kids,
yeah, mental health services and that has really shaped me.
You know, the idea that the big picture of our lives is about service to others and pursuit of things that are bigger than just your own self-interest.
I feel that I deeply absorbed that as a child and it's really shaped my adult life.
And the churches that I feel, you know, a particular overlap with in those values are also not afraid to take those values out of the church and translate them into, you know, political action as well.
That is something that is important to me at this point.
I've also seen, you know, the church really function as a third place for the people who really need it, particularly for the elderly, for the newly widowed, For people who are going through life transitions, through new babies, illnesses, deaths in the family.
Can we just clarify that by third space you're referring to the sort of urban studies concept of it's not work, it's not home, it's where you might gather and do something else?
Exactly.
Yeah, the place where you find your people.
And I think that's a space that is lacking for a lot of folks.
And there's a lot of loneliness out there.
But I've seen church communities really step up with meals, financial support, emotional support.
Over and over again.
And on a personal level, when I've gone through some really difficult times in my life, I've had many church communities and many church people really show up for me in a way that is deeply meaningful and I really appreciate.
The third value, I think, is the artist in me talking, but it's beauty.
I think church can be a place to expose people to great art.
And I'm a big believer that art, you know, lifts the mind and the spirit.
It asks people to ask the big questions of their lives.
It can lift people up from the kind of drudgery of everyday, and church can be an area that does expose people to great visual art and great music.
As a musician, I'm also, you know, deeply aware that music education programs are, you know, rapidly being cut in schools across the country, and volunteer church choir is often the only access that someone has to music education.
