Matthew Remsky hosts a poignant eulogy for Joseph Willard Baker, a 51-year-old Michigan social worker and Ironman finisher who died on February 4th from appendix cancer. Their correspondence, spanning March 2024 to a Toronto-Detroit interview, highlighted Baker's radical anti-capitalist theology and critique of Remsky's dismissal of indigenous spirituality. Though Remsky could not attend the Detroit funeral due to Canadian border fears, he honors Baker's influence on liberation politics and their shared engagement with A Course in Miracles, transforming personal grief into a testament to faith intertwined with armed resistance against colonial structures. [Automatically generated summary]
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My name is Matthew Remsky.
This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the roots and intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
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This brief is called Eulogy for Joseph Baker, Faithful Listener.
You know, I think Jesus was hung on a piece of wood because he actually saw the ownership class vanishing tomorrow, not, you know, 300 years from now.
And he was ready to take steps to mobilize crowds of laborers and poor people to make that happen.
And you hear the same thing in the Song of Mary and Luke's Gospel, where, you know, just the birth of Jesus itself talked about the fulfillment of a world where the rich and the powerful were brought low and doing that despite whatever kind of resistance you might have thrown at him.
That was some of the anti-capitalist Christianity of Joseph Baker, a longtime listener of the podcast, a prolific commenter on our Patreon, and someone who became one of my best personal friends that I've never met in person.
Such is our online era.
I have a lot of experience with virtual friends, I guess.
You might have even heard me say that I haven't met Derek in person, and we've been working together almost every day for the past six years.
Now, I'm 95% sure that Derek is a real guy who I hope I can hug one day.
The 5% is the agnostic who holds out the possibility that this is all a dream, because sometimes it sure feels like that.
But I'll never be able to hug Joseph Baker, or I guess, his earthly presence.
He died back on February 4th of complications from a rare cancer of the appendix that he suffered with and survived for 14 years.
He was 51 years old.
For some reason, I thought he was older than me.
I think I am still at that age where I default into thinking that people who die must be older than me.
I think I should adjust my expectations.
But with Joseph, it was also because he seemed very wise and settled in himself.
Now, because my correspondence with Joseph was online, when his friend Corinne sent me his obituary, I had this uncanny experience of reading about all of these basics of his life that I had no idea about.
Joseph Willard Baker, born in 1974, he grew up in Troy, Michigan, and in college he studied social work.
He cooked, he biked, he hiked.
He did an Ironman in 2012.
And last fall, Joe became a theology student at the United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities.
And he recently began cooking for the soup kitchen at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Detroit.
I learned the names of his people, his parents, Wally and Linda, two brothers, Travis and Brad, a partner named Renee.
Hello to you all.
by the way, if you're listening.
I can't imagine how much you miss him.
Corinne told me that the church was packed for his service and that, quote, it was the most beautiful and moving celebration of life I've ever experienced.
And at the end, I'll tell you what they read from and what they sang together.
Now, another thing that I knew a little bit about, Joseph was the father of Anna Lise, who's 25.
And he had told me that she was part of his political journey.
In 2016, when she was 15, they had door-knocked together for Hillary Clinton, who ultimately lost in Michigan.
And he told me that after that, he and Lise had followed a parallel arc of radicalization.
Now, he told me enough about it that I asked him to see if Lise would want to join him for an interview for my other show called Anti-Fascist Dad, because that's kind of what it's all about.
It's about the intergenerational learning curve of radical politics.
We were in early discussions on that.
So Joseph was a virtual friend, but someone I always expected to meet.
He once mentioned he sometimes drove up through Toronto to meet with friends or, I think, a part of his family in the summers, and maybe he would stop by next time.
And last fall, I almost managed to schedule a trip to Windsor on a mission to find my grandfather's grave.
I want to know what he went through in World War II, because whatever that encounter with fascism was has shaped my family's life in a lot of ways.
But I need a photograph of his gravestone to prove kinship and to access his military records through the Canadian government.
Now, had I made it to Windsor, I definitely would have crossed the bridge to meet with Joseph.
And I would have attended his service in Detroit just a couple of weeks ago if it didn't mean crossing the border as a Canadian running a podcast with the word anti-fascist in the title, which at this point could very well lead to arrest and detention.
So that's what I know about the in-real life Joseph, which means I can't really eulogize him from a close perspective.
What I can do here is give a eulogy based on our virtual lives and describe how his thought really changed my life.
I'm just now grasping how deep his influence is and how far-reaching it is.
Whatever I go on to do in this line of work for as long as I have in this world will in part be shaped by my dialogue with him.
So Joseph showed up in our Patreon comments in July of 2023.
And between then and November of last year, he left 87 quite long, rich, thoughtful, nuanced, exploratory comments for our consideration.
And I'll get to what he focused on in a bit, but my deeper story with him really begins with how he reached out to me personally.
This was in March of 2024, so almost exactly two years ago.
He sent a long email addressing the fact that I had regularly published critical articles and podcasts about A Course in Miracles.
This is the New Age Bible from the late 1970s that made Marianne Williamson a very famous person through Oprah, and which happened to be the source book used by the high demand group in Wisconsin called Endeavor Academy, where I spun my wheels for a number of years, three years actually.
So this is the book that recasts Christianity through the psychology of new thought.
It says that reality is pure, unified spirit.
The physical world is an illusion born of fear and separation.
Miracles are acts of love that restore the memory of our shared divine nature.
And that forgiveness is the doorway to every miracle.
Now, when Joseph wrote to me, and for many years before that, I really hated this book.
And I had constructed an elaborate, but also valid critique of it, I think, as a dissociative apologia for the neoliberal self-project.
You can look back through our archive and just search A Course in Miracles and you'll hear me ranting about it, just like Joseph did.
I also took this book and its pure idealism personally because it had been used against me.
But Joseph, who had picked up A Course in Miracles in 1993, this is seven years before I did, he cherished this book and bafflingly to me, found in it the prophetic inspiration for his political activism.
He used it to understand and orient himself as a social worker with nearly two decades at Michigan Child Protective Services.
So this was a person who did way more hands-on helping work than I'd ever done.
And somehow this book had brought him closer to Earth when what I had seen was that it could take so many people into outer space.
And so I wanted to know what the difference was between us that our paths could diverge so sharply and yet intersect again in this time.
Let me read how he opened this first letter because I think it says a lot about Joseph.
Quote, To start, I want to acknowledge that in your earlier life, decades ago, most of your previous correspondence with Course people involved manipulation.
Whether intentional or not, manipulation occurs because of the predominant ways in which the Course teachings are used to communicate by people who fall into it with their whole self.
So this is a pretty sensitive way to start, to acknowledge my associations with a book, to give reasons for why it's often used the way it is.
And I also think that he's describing that for some, the book just becomes all-encompassing and it erased every other form of learning and insight for them.
And that's not what happened with him because he was working in social work.
He goes on, A lot of my dialogue with course students, even some in my own group, leads to unsettling feelings.
I walk away often quite puzzled at how people process their trauma and grievance through a course lens and come out sounding so obviously spiteful and self-absorbed.
In my professional life, I am expected to have the most well-calibrated attunement to abuse, neglect, and exploitation.
I arbitrate any dispute on criteria for field assignment across an entire state when those questions are debated.
I like to think I do a good job at that.
Yet I am a course student, an aspiring teacher, and I'm sure setting me apart from those previous experiences for you is not something I take for granted.
It's not done lightly based on your previous exposure.
So he does a lot here.
He acknowledges my cult history.
He says, you know, there are these ways in which this book can be weaponized and how I might be rightly skeptical of him writing in.
But then from there, he went on to unpack how he understands this book that I found so weird and irritating, so apolitical, if not reactionary, not to mention condescending and often boring.
And he did it in a way that expanded my view and my mind.
Our email dialogue continued from that point for about six months until I finally asked him to come on the show and discuss it.
I was running a series at the time called Listener Stories, in which I'd interview listeners who had written in about their experiences in churches, cults, or new age wellness.
And so we sat down in front of our screens, myself in Toronto, Joseph in Detroit.
We recorded for over two hours.
And that clip at the top of the episode came from that interview, which I'm currently editing to post in full to our Patreon in a few weeks.
And it's surreal to edit it now.
We had actually put it in the can and agreed that we would re-record it and try to be more concise.
So we did have plans for that, but no date.
So now I'm just going to make this original recording work.
And I think it does.
And as I'm listening to it, I just realized that that afternoon was a kind of turning point in my work on this podcast.
Listening to Joseph carefully, I realized not only how much we shared in common politically, but also that I had a number of conflicts to look at in my cynicism towards the uses of spirituality in this age.
I had a disposition framed by the vexing and humiliating time I had lost to cults.
I had little instinct to move beyond that framework, which was essentially paranoid and self-protective, always looking for the cognitive error or moral hypocrisy in a person's spiritual creed without really looking at what else it offered their lives.
By January of 2024, I was into my 10th year or so of researching and doing journalism on toxic religions and high-demand groups.
I woke up every day and girded myself to go out and just sort things out like some kind of cop.
And then along comes Joseph, who was still a seeker, as I had once been.
But he wasn't naive.
In fact, he also had been roped into a toxic group that was constellated around a self-centered teacher of A Course in Miracles.
And like me, he had left it behind.
But unlike me, he didn't convert that experience into a life of constant cultural criticism.
He was able to take the book with him out of the group and not disown that part of him, as I had, that was first attracted to its lessons.
So I came away from my cult experience in tatters, but he didn't.
And so I wanted to understand what was different between us.
Temperament, sure, but there was also the balance of his social service work, which never, as I suggested above, let the book become all-encompassing or some final answer to the intractable problems of daily justice in this world.
The Blind Spot of Privilege00:06:37
Now, in our discussion, Joseph also pointed out an uncomfortable blind spot of mine.
It was related to my spotlighting of A Course in Miracles as being a channeled text as a slam dunk on its fraudulence.
Now, for those who don't know, A Course in Miracles was the product of alleged channeled writing by a New York City psychologist named Helen Schookman, who said she heard the voice of Jesus for seven years during the 1960s and early 70s.
Impossible, right?
Now, if I were simply an atheist, Joseph wouldn't have spotted anything or reached out or thought he could reach out, but I'm not an atheist and he could tell, and so he picked up on a contradiction on how I handled that particular issue.
He pointed out that I had a tendency to label Western or white, for lack of a better term, supernatural beliefs, as pathological, but I wouldn't do the same thing in relation to indigenous or shamanic practices or the practices of marginalized people, to which I granted a special epistemological status.
So magical thinking was a label that I could apply to white people, but I wouldn't do it with brown people.
Now, I was aware of this contradiction from having argued about it with my colleague Julian, who is a very consistent atheist.
And he would correctly say, Matthew, you are applying these standards based upon your political values.
And he was right.
Of course, people of all cultures are vulnerable to magical thinking.
What I was concerned about from a leftist point of view was that it is a failure of solidarity to be condescending about the spirituality of marginalized people when it was obviously so important to their politics of liberation.
Like, who was I to question the faith or rationalism of the Black Baptists at the center of the civil rights movement?
But when it came to the ghoulish leaders of white Christian nationalism, I had no problem dismissing them as frauds.
Joseph was pointing out the same contradiction that Julian was pointing out, but he was coming from the opposite direction.
He basically said, if you are saying that marginalized folks can channel voices or commune with spirits, but white people should know better, what are you actually saying about marginalized people?
Is your respect for them in this area based on some idea of their benign ignorance?
Aren't you patronizing them?
Aren't you pretending that, you know, this is respect or deference?
He pointed to the indigenous archaeologist Paulette Steves, who argues that dismissing oral traditions because they lack Western scientific evidence cannot be separated from other attitudes within systemic racism.
Steves was the one who challenged the dominant short chronology model that places human arrival in the Americas at 15,000 years ago.
She drew on indigenous oral traditions and archaeological evidence to argue for a human presence of 100,000 years or more.
And so Joseph asked, what do you think Steves would say about the erased oral traditions of Europe and how far back they go and what they might tell us?
So Joseph exposed this inconsistency in me, but then he took it a step further.
It seems you believe, he said, that if you're white and you're a Westerner and you're adopting mystical ideas, you really can't do that in a healthy way, that it's ultimately going to lead to some type of pathology or dysfunction.
And he's saying this to me, who's a guy who goes every year to, you know, a powwow on Manitoulin Island and listens to the drums and smells the sage and stands in reverence before the people as they talk to their ancestors.
And so it made me wonder, how deep is my alienation or disenchantment if I believe those mystical experiences are for them, but not for me?
Have I been holding myself back from something I remember from long ago?
Didn't I grow up with Catholic saints and angels?
Didn't my people before me long ago find their gods in the forests?
Did they really go anywhere?
Have I shriveled in their absence?
Where is my heritage of wisdom?
And then it went a little bit deeper again, because I realized in talking with Joseph that when I listen to Martin Luther King Jr. speak, for example, a part of me really does believe that he has some kind of otherworldly strength and blessing, and that his invocation of Jesus really does carry something from beyond what we know.
Now, that part of me is small, and it's generally overwritten by the part that knows MLK Jr. was just a man like any other, using the best materials at hand to help his community.
But the part of me that believes in King's belief is overshadowed by this feeling that I can't join him in that, that I could never take joy in faith like he seemed to.
It was beyond me.
I was too disenchanted.
I knew too much to be faithful.
Now, I never got to share this observation with Joseph, but I'm just going to close my eyes now and imagine that he's here and what he would say.
Matthew, you think you are a modern and rational person, and yet I know you feel something that flows through King or Cesar Romero or Simon Vey, that God is love, that no matter what, you are loved.
Isn't that yours as well?
Isn't that something that belongs to you?
Prophetic Hope and Radical Flank00:05:36
Do you really think you are unworthy of it?
Can you forgive yourself for this unworthy feeling?
So, look at that.
I think I'm channeling Joseph Willard Baker.
Now, Joseph's radical application of A Course in Miracles shone through in his public comments on the podcast content, especially as the genocide in Gaza accelerated.
He was an anti-Zionist, one-state advocate who grounded his position in historical scholarship and personal experience.
He'd traveled through Israel and Palestinian territories as a student, and he'd lived in both Zionist and Palestinian communities.
And he drew on writers like Pape, Mizrahi Voices, Jabotinsky's own words to argue that Zionism was structurally colonial and irreformable.
He was always quoting Palestinian sources and Arab historians that I had to go and look up.
He rejected the reduction of Hamas to terrorism alone.
He contextualized their governance and armed resistance within a framework of colonial response.
And the guy who once door-knocked for Hillary identified democratic complicity in the genocide as a defining political betrayal.
And remember, he's writing back and forth with me from Michigan where the uncommitted movement is making its stand during the run-up to the 2024 election.
Joseph's work in child services transformed him into an abolitionist who believed the totalizing forces of capitalism and carceral logic couldn't be reformed from within.
He applied Dorothy Roberts' child welfare abolitionism as a guide in his work across Michigan.
Roberts argued the child welfare system is a racist institution that surveils and destroys black families under the guise of protection.
The answer, Joseph thought, was abolition and community investment, not reform.
Now, most surprising of all, maybe for someone who shared a favorite book with Marion Williamson, is that Joseph was also skeptical of nonviolence as a doctrine.
He drew on critics of Gene Sharp and Erika Chenoweth, as well as anarchist texts to argue that armed resistance had legitimate strategic and moral dimensions.
So I learned a lot from Joseph, and I think a lot of people on our Patreon did, whether they agreed with him or not.
He certainly provided a lot of material that was really well studied and well-reasoned.
And I learned from him not only in these content areas, but also in the balance that he struck between sober criticism and a kind of gentleness and patience and forbearance that seemed just tireless.
He was direct, but never insulting.
He always focused on systems rather than people.
And watching Joseph navigate this reminded me of a Marxist dialectical principle, especially in relation to his love for A Course in Miracles.
If religion, like any aspect of culture, was downstream of our political and economic conditions, there would always be a radical flank in whatever spirituality or religion you were looking at.
Joseph was in the radical flank of A Course in Miracles.
And why shouldn't there be one?
Early in 2025, I got a book in the mail from Joseph.
It was his book.
It was called This Time No Cathedrals, Exploring Jesus' Vision for a Transformed World from First Century to A Course in Miracles.
It's been by my bed since then, but I've only looked at it a few times.
Now that he's gone, I feel conflicted about picking it up because I know it would just make me want to talk with him again.
But here's a short passage that I think captures the prophetic hope the Course filled him with.
Quote, Jesus' message quite unexpectedly spread across the ancient world, from Egypt to Rome and the coast of India.
It spread as a house church movement, not with grand cathedrals.
I think the Course will have its own breakthrough one day, but there must be a way of doing that within horizontal leadership, with the direct and full democracy that curbed the tendency toward power abuse, without the priests, bishops, and cathedrals.
This time, it will resemble the house-church movement of the proto-church, where you read, eat, sing, and pray together in larger egalitarian society with others who may or may not be into your path.
So I'm definitely going to read the book because who knows how much more of my younger self might be healed by understanding this text that had confounded my life through the eyes of someone I admire so much.
Now, as for the funeral, part of me is glad I didn't get to go to it because I was afraid of being arrested by CBP.
Healing Through Joseph's Eyes00:02:46
I would have been a mess throughout the whole thing and for days after.
Corinne emailed me a PDF of the program and it was off the hook.
Grateful Dead, Leonard Cohen, Wade in the Water, this little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine.
And of course, plenty of readings from A Course in Miracles, including this first one that Lise read.
Quote, Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures come to die.
Now they have water.
Now the world is green.
And everywhere the signs of life spring up to show that what is born can never die, for what has life has immortality.
And then at some point, they sang Bella Chow, and they used the lyrics from Chumbawamba.
The world is waking outside my window, Bella Chow, drags my senses into the sunlight, for there are things that I must do.
Wish me luck now.
I have to leave you.
Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Chow Chow.
With my friends now up to the city, we're going to shake the gates of hell.
So I never got to meet Joseph, but I can feel that he's kind of everywhere now, sharing space with my ancestors inside me, also people crucial to me who I never met.
So turning to you, dear podcast audience, if we have communicated in ways large or small, I have a similar relationship with you in a way.
And so I'm thinking of you, whoever you are, and whenever you hear this, I'm thinking of all the people whose hands I would grasp and shake if I could see you in person.
And the thought has me wavering between melancholy and peace.
Because somehow, I think we must all connect the small circle of our embodied relationships with the impossible expanse of the human family, now made more vivid, though sometimes distorted, in our online life.
I think Joseph Baker's religion and service gave him a skill for doing that, and I will never forget it.