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Holly Meyer | The Tennessean

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Photo submitted by Jim Palmer

Two devastating events in the lives of church members made former evangelical pastor Jim Palmer step back and question everything he taught about God.

Palmer, who started a church in Brentwood in the 1990s, said the first was a revelation that a staff member was beating a spouse.

The second came when a mother-to-be, bolstered by Palmer's sermons that anything is possible with God if you have enough faith, believed her unborn child with a fatal disorder could survive. The infant died soon after birth, and the mother blamed herself, he said.

"That triggered, 'How can I preach this stuff?'" Palmer said. "Beneath the appearance and the surfaces of people's lives there was a level of suffering and brokenness for which my theology did not touch."

Those cataclysmic moments about two decades ago sent Palmer down an introspective path that led to him leaving ministry, the end of his marriage and the eventual realization that he no longer believed in the supernatural.

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Palmer, who has written several books about his journey out of religion, will share his story Sunday afternoon and moderate a panel discussion with other former ministers who have lost their religion as a part of an event hosted by the Nashville Humanist Association.

In August, Palmer, 53, and Kay Overlund, 34, founded the Nashville chapter of the American Humanist Association. The organization promotes humanism, a perspective that uses science and reason to explain the world and dignity and compassion as the basis for how to treat other humans.

Palmer thinks people choose to be good and choose to be bad, but he believes firmly in humanity and its ability to alleviate suffering and promote human flourishing.

"I'm still going to plant my flag down on the belief that we are who we've been waiting for. There is no God in the sky who is going to rescue us," Palmer said. "We've got to pull up our big boy and big girl panties and be human beings."

Leaving religion upended Palmer's identity as well as his career. He had become a Christian in high school, deepened his faith in college and moved to Chicago for seminary.

After college, Palmer said he took a ministry job at Willow Creek Community Church, the famous megachurch in a suburb of Chicago, before moving to the Nashville area to start Springbrook Community Church, an affiliate church that eventually drew about 600 people each week.

Today, Palmer, who was born in Bristol, Tenn., and raised in Virginia, helps others who find themselves in a similar position. He created a Life After Religion course as part of that work.

He also is a member of The Clergy Project, an organization that supports religious leaders who no longer believe in the supernatural. Sunday's 1 p.m. program held at the Metro police department's West Precinct also will include a screening of "Losing Our Religion," which is about The Clergy Project.

Palmer and Overland started the Nashville Humanist Association as a way to bolster the secular community in Nashville, especially given the rising number of Americans who do not identify with a religious group. Last year, 21 percent of Nashville metro area residents identified as religiously unaffiliated, the PRRI's American Values Atlas says.

The Nashville chapter tries to meet a couple of times a month for events, volunteer opportunities and round-table discussions, Overlund said. They coordinate those in-person, community-building events through the online networking service Meetup. Nearly 200 people are in the association's Meetup group.

However, the founders plan to send the chapter in a new direction in 2018. They are doing away with the round-table discussions that tend to attract a small group of middle-aged white men in favor of boosting their online educational offerings, targeting a diverse group of young adults.

"They don't have time to come to these meetings every other week and spend two hours discussing philosophy. They're just not interested," Overland said. "There's a younger generation that's coming up that needs a framework that's relatable."

Millennials are driving the growth of the religiously unaffiliated, also called the "nones," in the U.S. Thirty-five percent of Americans born between 1981 and 1996 are religiously unaffiliated, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center report.

Sunday's event fits into the new vision by illustrating that all kinds of people are leaving religion, Overlund said.

"It's happening to a lot of people and it doesn't matter your age, your race ... Even pastors from churches are walking away from their faith," Overlund said. "People are starting to understand and see reason."

Reach Holly Meyer at hmeyer@tennessean.com or 615-259-8241 and on Twitter @HollyAMeyer.

If you go:

What: Nashville Humanist event

When: 1 p.m. Sunday

Where: West Police Precinct, 5500 Charlotte Pike