Jim Palmer 0:00

Whatever it is that you might be experiencing as someone who's sort of wrestling with your faith, there's nothing wrong with you. This is change that's happening at the deepest level of who you are. Is there a God? Who is that God? What happens when you die? What's true? Uh, what are my beliefs? What's the meaning and purpose of life? And so the good news with that is even though that that's painful and volatile and destabilizing, I the hopeful thing is that it's some really deep transformational change in the very substructures of who you are. You know, this is it's a threshold.

Jeromy Johnson 0:37

Okay, hear me out. What if we did something that they want to end up in the phone? What happens when the beliefs that shape your identity start to fall apart? Not just what you believe, but who you are, where you belong, and what gives your life meaning. Today's guest is Jim Palmer, who walked away from Mega Church leadership and into a complete resurrection of faith, identity, and spirituality. We talk about what it costs to leave, and more importantly, what it means to rebuild from the inside out. I'm your host, Jeremy Johnson, and you're listening to Sloody Grace. Today I am joined by Jim Palmer. He's an author, speaker, and former megachurch pastor who has spent years helping people reimagine faith beyond fear, performance, and uh religious control. Jim is the founder of the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality and the author of several books exploring deconstruction, authenticity, and what it means to live spiritually awake without the baggage of toxic theology. Jim, welcome, man.

Jim Palmer 1:53

Jeremy, thanks. Awesome. It's good to be here. I appreciate you having me on.

Jeromy Johnson 1:58

And you uh fled the United States and you're now living in Costa Rica, correct?

Jim Palmer 2:03

We've been in Costa Rica going on about nine months, a little Tico village, you know, learning Spanish day by day.

Jeromy Johnson 2:11

Nice. Before we talk about the deconstruction stuff and non-religious spirituality, can you take us back? Like who were you when you were at your, I'm gonna use peak in quotation marks. Who were you when you were at your peak as a as a mega church pastor? And uh what cracks first begin to show with that? Kind of give us a little bit of that background.

Jim Palmer 2:32

I um grew up in a very dysfunctional, volatile, violent family. You know, my mother was an alcoholic, she suffered from mental illness. My father left when I was very young. My older brother was a drug addict, he was also a very violent individual, and I barely escaped out of high school. I mean, I don't even know actually how I passed, but somehow I miraculously did. And I used that as my opportunity to um go away to college. Now I was loosely raised Catholic, but I can't say I really ever had an interest in God or Christianity or Jesus, but just kind of like something that I did uh because it was required for the most part. But then, strangely enough, the my senior year before going off to college, a uh fellow football player, his father was on staff for the campus ministry called the Navigators. We had breakfast at McDonald's and over a cup of coffee and an egg McMuffin, he led me to Christ. I prayed the sinner's prayer and I became a born-again Christian. So yeah, I went off to college and I was gonna play sports in college, but I had a serious injury, which prevented me from doing that. But I went anyway. Now, as a new born-again Christian, nearly my first week in the student center at East Tennessee State University, which is where I did my undergrad. I ran into the campus director for the Campus Crusade for Christ ministry.

Jeromy Johnson 3:53

Okay.

Jim Palmer 3:54

We became friends, he invited me out to their meetings. He asked me to uh get up and give one of those, you know, three-minute testimonies, you know, how terrible your life was before you came to Jesus and meeting Jesus. Holy okay.

Jeromy Johnson 4:07

Yeah. And everything's shiny in roses now.

Jim Palmer 4:10

Right. Everything's perfect. So I got up and did one of those. And unbeknownst to me, like, I don't know, somebody came over to me and I like delivered this like charismatic, impassioned speech about my conversion story. And if you're a charismatic person and you have an interest in Jesus, you're pretty much at that point going to be groomed into some position of leadership. Yeah. That's kind of what happened. I became the student body president of Campus Christ for Christ, did that. And then rather than going on staff with Crusade, I decided because of the I met a gentleman who was church planting in Johnson City, Tennessee, where I was doing my undergrad. We met, he convinced me to become a pastor. I went up to Chicago and went to Trinity Divinity School. And of course, that's where I got my MDiv, you know, won all these preaching awards, was kind of blazing my way through seminary.

Jeromy Johnson 5:05

You were the golden child.

Jim Palmer 5:06

Yeah, the golden child. And one of the professors said, you know, there's a church that's in the Bannockburn area, and they're looking to hire some pastors. We recommended that they look at you and why don't you go down there and talk to someone? So, anyway, off I went. And I swore I could not find this church. I drove exactly where the location was, you know, back and forth all around. I I could not find it. Until I realized that that massive university I kept driving by wasn't the university, it was actually the church. And that's I couldn't believe.

Jeromy Johnson 5:40

Oh.

Jim Palmer 5:40

Well, that ended up being they ended up being Willow Creek Community Church. So anyway, I went in, I met with Bill Highbulls, and at the time, Don Cousins was this kind of the number two guy there who kind of built the guts of Willow Creek and so on. Okay. And I joined this staff as a teaching pastor, did that for some years, and then went back to Nashville and started a Willow Creek style church. When you're doing this sort of thing, when you're in the mega church circles, when you're having success numerically in, you know, the evangelical world, then you're asked to speak at conferences, you're sort of viewed as some sort of like celebrity. And so there were cracks for sure. I think that one of the cracks for me was the day that it just kind of hit me that despite all my upstanding Greek and Hebrew, bulletproof evangelical theology that I learned in seminary and taught every day in church, despite that, it just seemed like the problems that people had in our congregation, they persisted either way. Uh, depression, relationship struggles, anxiety.

Jeromy Johnson 6:48

So this was like after they got they started getting honest, despite being Christian and being part of this awesome church who has like every ministry under the sun, right? Those big mega churches. I mean, they have every single ministry you can possibly think of. And so despite that, people were still depressed, people were still anxious. And that's what you were seeing.

Jim Palmer 7:09

Yeah, still broken marriages and uh despair that you could see or find in people if you ever kind of pushed back from the meeting-based relationships that we often had. I guess you can say that the show that broke the camel's back is when the wife of one of our worship leaders asked me if I'd be willing to have coffee with her, agreed to do this while we met. She like pulled up her shirt and pulled up her dress and showed me all these bruises, you know, all over her body because our one of the worship leaders at the church was a very violent individual who was assaulting her. And that was the beginning of my sort of deep questioning. Like, something's not right here. And it wasn't just pointing the fingers at the dysfunction or the lack of wholeness in the people that I saw in church, but it, you know, like in this moment of rare honesty with myself, I realized that that described me too. I was anxious, I was, you know, also a broken person. I didn't really have any deep peace. You know, I was running around trying to manage this monstrosity. And so eventually I just got to the point where, like, okay, something is really wrong with what I'm telling myself and other people in terms of what I believe in my theology and what it's really looking like in my actual experience. And that cognitive dissonance caused me to walk away. Yeah. Walk away from my Christian faith, walk away from my ministerial career. I had to figure out what is the problem here. I just I couldn't do it anymore. And um, that would have been back in what, like the 98, 99-ish period of time.

Jeromy Johnson 8:55

And I imagine there was no outward signs like with that worship pastor and his wife. Probably everything from the outside looked spot on until she showed you the bruises and you saw underneath the curtains, right? Under the covers, in a sense.

Jim Palmer 9:09

And in more toxic religious environments, you know, the culture doesn't breed vulnerability, no, authenticity, honesty. You kind of have to maintain the performance of being a good Christian. The saddest part of that is it that that includes a performance you feel like that you have to pull off in order to curry the favor of God, but you certainly have to maintain your status in the church. Church could be very bad for your mental health for many reasons, and that's kind of one of them is that they perpetuate that lack of authenticity and vulnerability, the fear of being found out. Yeah. And part of the, you know, part of the problem is that religion doesn't do a very good job of normalizing the the spectrum of the human experience and holds up an ideal that virtually no one can live. And then we're all shy when we discover that, you know, something happens that kind of breaks our, you, you know, the people that we put on pedestals, the the people that we think of as being the gurus that we can trust and so on.

Jeromy Johnson 10:22

To a certain extent, we're taught not to I mean not to really think ourselves, not to trust ourselves. And we just listen to the leaders and we listen to what they teach. And we're not really taught to dive into it ourselves, because if we were, then questions would be okay. Right? Like real questions. What? Hell, explain this to me, right? But it's not like you can do some surface level questions, but as you know, once you start diving into certain questions, uh, you're not you're not welcome anymore, you know.

Jim Palmer 10:51

I think most people inherited their belief system and didn't necessarily apply a lot of critical thinking. I mean, I can almost predict what religion you are based on where you were born.

Jeromy Johnson 11:04

Jesus, yeah.

Jim Palmer 11:06

It's not as if we sat down and looked at like a spectrum of religions and then we sort of applied critical thinking. We looked at the beliefs and doctors. And so, you know, a lot of people are indoctrinated into their belief system from childhood, for example. And if you think about everything you get from your religious belief system, so virtually every existential question of significance has a certain and absolute answer. Your sense of identity and who you are as a person is defined by your religious uh belief system, your relationships and a community of belonging is tied to that belief system. Yes, your sense of meaning and purpose and direction in the world is tied to that belief system. And so there's a big reason not to question it. There's so much at stake. And because the church doesn't typically encourage critical thinking, questioning until there's a crisis or there's suffering or the cognitive dissonance becomes so great. Yeah, you know, like the person who's on their knees praying and praying and praying that you know God will heal the terminal illness of their loved one, and they get on Facebook and they see how someone says, Praise God, you know, my spouse was healed from this, and yet this person's praying every day that God would intervene, and then their loved one dies, and suddenly, like, that doesn't make sense.

Jeromy Johnson 12:26

That was my sister. She died of cancer when she was 29, and I mean she had the prayer chain, she was a fantastic person. Um, yeah, cancer got her. You're like, well, why her and not the 88-year-old angry man who smokes five cigars every day? Like, why is he still around, you know?

Jim Palmer 12:43

Yeah, or the the 70-year-old pedophile, right? Or, you know, serial killer who's like on death row.

Jeromy Johnson 12:49

Wait, are there 70-year-old pedophiles in this country? Wait, what?

Jim Palmer 12:53

Unfortunately, there are.

Jeromy Johnson 12:54

Yeah. Uh and and yeah, I think what you're saying is like when somebody does leave religious structure, they honestly often feel like they're losing their faith, and there's so much to lose. I mean, you just rattled off a list of five things that are core to your identity. What did you actually lose? And then to follow up with that, like what did you find waiting on the other side? So, like, what did you lose? And then kind of what did you gain with that walking away?

Jim Palmer 13:51

I I definitely lost most of what I had on that list. I lost the community of people that provided sort of that social support and relational network of people. I mostly lost that. I lost my identity that was wrapped around being a Christian and being a mega church pastor. I lost my belief structure because virtually 90% of my Christian theology I pretty quickly deconstructed away. Uh, so I lost that belief system orientation. Um, I lost my economic security because you know, I went through that path of going to seminary, going to theological school, getting a job in ministry. And so um I lost that. The the scaffolding that really held up virtually every aspect of my life collapsed. And I think this is often the way it is with people who leave religion. You know, that I think that's why a lot of people sometimes will experience some form of nihilism. Because when that scaffolding collapses and your sense of meaning, purpose, your confidence in what you were taught, your worldview, your beliefs about God and so, you know, when all that gets disrupted, then it can be a pretty bleak place. But I really see it as a threshold and maybe even a necessary part of the spiritual journey. It can be transformational. It doesn't have it's not necessarily pathological to be at a place of nihilism. You know, I did start writing about what it was like being out of religion. I started writing on a blog, and then it was cathartic to sit down and kind of put it on paper and write it through.

Jeromy Johnson 15:32

Yeah. What did you find waiting on the other side?

Jim Palmer 15:35

I think probably the biggest thing was the opportunity to create a path forward from the inside out.

Jeromy Johnson 15:42

God, I like how you said that. That's so true.

Jim Palmer 15:44

I was following a belief system that was external to me that I received through what were considered to be the authorities on the theology and God and worldview and things like this. And the the collapse of the inherited external belief system ended up kind of creating a a space that allowed me to begin to self-author my path forward from the inside out. And that that wasn't an easy thing to do necessarily, because the the the kind of difficulty with leaving at least a toxic religious environment is that not only does it give you the belief system and kind of binds you to that, but then it also teaches you that you're really not capable in and of yourself to fashion a path forward outside of it, right? You're a sinner, you're inherently sinful, you can't trust yourself, your heart is deceitful. You know, this idea that that you can like from the inside out is just a bunch of BS because you're you're not capable of doing any of that. And so this idea of self-agency or self-determination or freedom, like people are very much not confident to go down that path because religion has poisoned them against their own dignity, their own capabilities, their own skills and yeah, and tools to go forward just as a species, just as Homo sapiens, that we have a whole set of skills that can be useful in that regard.

Jeromy Johnson 17:18

Yeah, and relearning to trust your gut, or maybe not even relearning, but maybe learning for the first time to trust your gut, to trust your intuition, to trust that maybe what you're thinking and feeling and believing could be good. And then even that, right? Just believe that like I'm inherently good, not inherently bad. Like that's a huge, huge mental shift from an evangelical standpoint.

Jim Palmer 17:43

Yeah, I religion also tends to kind of poison a person's relationship with their body. So, for example, they're not going to look at their body as a source of legitimate guidance, not their body, not their emotions, probably not even their intellect if it involves wandering out of the uh acceptable little streams of thought. I think one thing you said I thought was interesting is that I think that one of the flaws of what is kind of referred to as a spiritual but not religious movement, although I get it and understand it. There are a lot of things about it, it's not just one thing, but one of the things that I've noticed is that it can be sort of hyper-individualistic.

Jeromy Johnson 18:24

Yeah.

Jim Palmer 18:25

Even this idea of finding the truth within yourself or your inner truth or guiding your path forward from the inside out, that can sound like a highly individualistic sort of path. But I really look at it as a very relational one. That the path forward is your relationship with yourself, your relationship with others, your relationship with the world, your relationship with the more than human world. It's it's a relational dynamic. It's not just sort of like you sitting in your room with a bunch of progressive Christian books. It's like a belief system swap.

Jeromy Johnson 19:01

Yeah, but the core is kind of still the same. That's beautiful how you put that, how it is about relationship with ourselves, with each other. So, Jim, I'm curious, is there anything about Jesus that after all this that remained compelling to you? Or was it like everything was tossed out?

Jim Palmer 19:16

That's really interesting because there's probably two people that I annoy pretty consistently. The two people that I annoy consistently are the people who just wish I would not talk about Jesus at all.

Jeromy Johnson 19:29

Yes.

Jim Palmer 19:30

Yeah, you know, they just get annoyed because I talk about Jesus at all. And then the other people who get avoid, you know, get avoided is that they don't like that I do talk about Jesus because I don't like what I have to say about him. So what I say about Jesus doesn't always jive with where with uh with what other people think. Yeah, you know, the whole question about Jesus is uh it can be a uh controversial one. I easily kind of deep-sixed most of my Christian theology. I I deconstructed traditional theism, I deconstructed the trinity, I deconstructed eternal life in heaven, I deconstructed eternal conscious torment, I deconstructed the infallibility of the Bible, I deconstructed intercessory prayer. I mean, you just keep going on all the things that I sort of like took apart and deconstructed, and for the most part, you know, left behind, at least in sort of the original form in which I learned. But the one part that was very difficult that I couldn't seem to deconstruct away entirely, was Jesus. I kept writing about Jesus, and every time I wrote about Jesus, I wasn't really that happy with what I had to say about it. And so we just kind of kept evolving over time. An interesting thing is still today, among the people that I connect with, which are mostly people that have left religion, the uh non-religious crowd of people who are on the spectrum of could be anything from agnostics to atheists, people who have definitely walked away and reject any form of sort of like traditional Christianity. And yet their interest in Jesus persists. In fact, whenever I write anything about Jesus, it's almost always the most popular and shared. Anything I do on social media, people come out of the woodwork. Jesus persists as a figure of interest and for many different reasons. And I think that we tend to invent the Jesus that aligns with the age that we're in.

Jeromy Johnson 21:23

You mean uh when you say the age, you're not talking about like us biological age, you're just talking about the the age of humanity that we're in. So like the the space of time that we're in.

Jim Palmer 21:33

Right, right. The cultural mood or or the historical you know, time that that we're in.

Jeromy Johnson 21:39

Okay.

Jim Palmer 21:40

I think for me, what I realized is virtually everything that I learned about Jesus from Christianity, I concluded was mostly wrong. That Jesus never intended to start a religion, a religion, Jesus is not the founder of Christianity, Jesus obviously never wrote anything in the Bible, Jesus did not hold a traditional view of God, Jesus confronted empire, he spoke truth to the religious gatekeepers of his day. Jesus was confrontational and even combative against institutional uh religious harm.

Jeromy Johnson 22:12

And we haven't even gotten into the Gnostic Gospels yet.

Jim Palmer 22:16

Right, right. I think that there's so much about the enduring person, figure, legend, archetype of Jesus that still holds sway. And honestly, the the more Cry Jesus out of that framework, then I think the more significant he becomes a universal significance. To me, the core of the religious problem, one of them, is the conceives of the idea of separation from God and estrangement from God, and that this is the fundamental truth. And that is sort of like the core belief from which almost all of other Christian theology is built.

Jeromy Johnson 22:58

Yeah, it really is.

Jim Palmer 23:00

I think the great contribution that Jesus made was to obliterate this idea that God and humankind are separated. And when Jesus refers to himself as divine and human, I think we're getting it wrong if we're thinking that Jesus is making some claim about himself that is unique and different from all other human beings. And instead, he's articulating a truth, which is that humankind, however you want, whatever word you want to put this in, whether it's divine and human or transcendent and human or whatever is the ground of all being, whatever is the transcendent reality, whatever word you put to that, whatever that is, we're never, we can't be separated from it. We're not separated from it. We are it, we're an expression of it. I think that that was one of the the great contributions that Jesus makes is that he kind of turns the whole religious framework of God upside down. You know, I think there's a whole lot about it about Jesus that a person could find to be meaningful after they walk away from religion.

Jeromy Johnson 24:03

I mean, before we were talking, you were saying actually, if you want to follow a model of deconstruction, just follow Jesus. Like he deconstructed pretty much the whole Jewish religion while he was here on earth. Uh, and he and he died for it, right, to a certain degree. Um, but what do you mean by post-religious Jesus? Are we talking like removing hierarchy, removing doctrine, fear, performance? What do you mean by that?

Jim Palmer 24:26

It would be all of the above and more. We're experiencing what people call a metacrisis. And the idea is that there's something unique about the time in which we live, and that there's sort of a confluence of crises that are coming together at the same time: mental health crisis, political crisis, economic crisis, technological crisis, uh, existential health crisis, and so on. And many people say that at the at the at the center of that is really a meaning crisis, that there's a crisis of meaning that's existing in the world. And I find it to be true in what I refer to as sort of a cultural nihilism, which is that there is a very deep lack of trust and faith in the institutions which we have historically looked to and depended on to orient ourselves in the world, religion, politics, medicine, media, technology, science, you know, whatever those are. This is more than just saying, Well, I'm just having an episodic bit of like questioning things. It's more like a cultural loss of trust and faith in the very structures of meaning that we have depended upon. I think that Jesus relates to this in many different ways. One of them, he had to cultivate his path forward in the midst of uncertainty, distress, confrontation, breakdown, crisis, betrayal, instability, fragility, vulnerability. And yet he exhibited a kind of integrity and authenticity and compassion and groundedness as a person moving through the world and in compassionate relationship, you know, with the world around him. The title that Jesus most used for himself was Son of Man. It wasn't Son of God. In the Son of Man title, you know, it was this radical identification with humankind, with humanity. I think we need that son of man, that one who walks through loneliness and despair and grief and heartache and chaos and then navigates that with integrity, compassion, love, peace, groundedness. And not just finding some inner peace within himself, like going up on a mountain, sitting somewhere and meditating, but the kind of peace that confronts what's wrong, right? Like the kind of the clear life that confronts empire and exploitation and dominance, the a kind of courageous solidarity that he lived in his life. Jesus was not a religious person. You know, he was a rebel, he was a revolutionary, he was considered, you know, um, he was an iconoclast, he was viewed as a very dangerous individual. Both religion and the government viewed him as somebody who was stirring up chaos and and revolution. This picture of a white Jesus with flowing hair and holding a baby lamb in his arms and walking around in a flowing robe, patting little children on the head and picking daisy, you know, all that kind of stuff is not at all the historical Jesus.

Jeromy Johnson 27:39

No, despite it hanging up in my hallway when I was growing up.

Jim Palmer 27:44

Right. White Jesus.

Jeromy Johnson 27:46

Yeah, now he would just wear a red hat too, but you know, we won't we won't go there. I mean, I would argue almost every single religion and some sub-religion that claims Jesus' name has tamed him, has systematically classified him, has put him into theological boxes that can be well defined and well-defended. And it's like I think that's part of what this post-religious Jesus would look like. He pushed against all of that.

Jim Palmer 28:14

Yeah, it's kind of like who owns Jesus exactly? The challenge is obviously that the only real, for the most part, what we know about Jesus is condensed into a set of gospels, and three of the four are roughly the same. And we know that there was a process of both oral tradition and then some sort of editorial process where decisions were made about what stories and teachings and parables were going to get into this work. And even if that was just a practical decision, not necessarily some kind of nefarious one, either way, we don't know anything about Jesus, mostly about his childhood or youth. And you know, look, if I was gonna write a short story about you know, a good friend of mine, and I had to select what I was gonna put in there and leave out, you know, I'd probably leave out that time he like went off on the on the cashier target, or that time we went to Vegas and he did things that maybe he shouldn't have done. You know, like right, you're not gonna, I'm not gonna include that in the story about my best friend. If you know, a lot of what we think about Jesus is based on what others wrote about him, like Paul, whoever you take to be the writers of the New Testament, kind of looking back at Jesus and sort of interpreting Jesus from their own theological lens. And, you know, I I'm not necessarily critical of Paul because hell, I mean, could any of us have done any better? I mean, you know, Paul's trying to figure it out himself. He's got it like send, you know, he's getting bombarded by these churches trying to figure it out.

Jeromy Johnson 29:43

He also wasn't writing scripture, he was writing personal letters to people that he knew and worked with and was using specific context, right, to like communicate something to them. He wasn't ever universally writing stuff for the entire world, let alone 2,000 years later.

Jim Palmer 29:59

Yeah. There was the Constantine, you know, there was what project, what would it have been? 325?

Jeromy Johnson 30:05

Yeah, it was the Council of Nicaea. Basically, it'd be like if our president called a meeting in Mar-a-Laga and he called 300 bishops together and said, All right, we're gonna decide this thing, and here we are.

Jim Palmer 30:18

Yeah, I mean, like there's no question that it's always been convenient to hijack Jesus for some agenda.

Jeromy Johnson 30:26

You are part of Center for Non-Religious Spirituality. I notice how it doesn't say non-religious Christianity, it doesn't say non-religious Judaism, doesn't say non-religious Mormonism, it's spirituality. So you you touch a lot of people, and and I don't I don't mean that in a creepy way, but you your ministry has has impacted a lot of people and you've worked with a lot of people. Can you tell me a little bit about your ministry and about like some of the people and the characteristics and just what you've learned over the years?

Jim Palmer 30:57

The Center for Non-Religious Spirituality, I founded back in 2019. There are generally four reasons why people show up at the center. The first is they are people who are interested in cultivating a spiritual life kind of untethered from the frameworks of traditional religion. The word religion is often associated with some dynamics that I think are more anthropological and less religious. The need for belonging, the need for ritual, sort of the meaning making as uh an orientation in life, uh, mythology building. That's one of the problems is sometimes when people leave religion, they're like, okay, I'm done with the whole thing. I'm done with going to church, I'm done with all the legalism, all the leaders, all the rituals, all these disciplines, all this stuff I had to do. And, you know, now I'm just like in the wide open spaces, you know, isn't this great? You don't have to do any of that stuff anymore. But what is missed, actually having rituals and traditions and a set of values and a story about the world that you feel connected to and a set of relationships that you belong in. Like that's just being human. So that really has nothing to do with religion. So a lot of people come to the center because they're interested, they want to know that they can pursue their interest in spirituality, but they're not gonna have to deal with an overly kind of traditional religious framework, meaning that you have to have some supernatural belief, or you have to believe in some version of God, or there's some metaphysical or transcendent dimension that you have to subscribe to. So that is one reason why people come is a community where they're not going to be judged, they can be themselves and they can kind of explore spirituality on their own terms. Now, that could end up being a spirituality that includes Jesus. It could be a spirituality that involves being atheists, it could be a spirituality that's involved, you know.

Jeromy Johnson 32:54

Yeah.

Jim Palmer 32:54

But it's kind of um one of those things where there's no dogma, there's no gurus, there's no doctrine that is prescribed. The second reason why people come is that they actually are in the process of leaving religion and they're looking for support in religious deconstruction and reconstruction. And they come to the center to receive some support and help and guidance in that part of the journey. The third are people that are actually in a place of spiritual crisis or nihilism. It's more of an acute existential crisis, and they come to the center because they're they're very distressed psychologically for spiritual reasons, for nihilism reasons. And so that's the third reason. And then the the last one is just people will come because they're interested in kind of doing this work. You know, they're interested in offering religious and deconstruction support to other people, you know, helping people who struggle through nihilism and this kind of thing. And so a lot of people come to the to the center for that reason. It's very much meant to be a community where people can connect, they can belong, they can cultivate friendships. It's not really meant to be like a a content, you know, driven, like here's a bunch of YouTube videos for you to watch, have a good day.

Jeromy Johnson 34:11

Yeah, like here's we're gonna meet for eight weeks and we're gonna go through my curriculum. Yeah, exactly. I'm totally curious about this. Have you found uh and I know like deconstruction can look differently. Have you found that it looks pretty similar from religion to religion, the religion? Like if you grew up Mormon, if you grew up Catholic, if you grew up evangelical, if you grew up, you name it. Like, is it are there similar themes that are pretty universal with that?

Jim Palmer 34:38

So there are some universal um aspects in the sense that when most people leave religion, they are gonna be affected by those common things they lose. They're gonna lose their belief system scaffolding, they're gonna lose their identity, they're gonna lose their community and belonging, things like that.

Jeromy Johnson 34:54

Yeah.

Jim Palmer 34:55

Um, but there is very much a uh an intersectional dynamic to religious deconstruction. For example, if you left toxic religion and you're a woman, you're gonna have to deconstruct religious patriarchy in a way you wouldn't need to if you were a man. If you are, you know, in the LBGQIA plus community, you left religion, you're going to have to deal with the suffering of being victimized because of your sexual orientation that, like a heterosexual, wouldn't. And there are several dynamics like that. Even black and white, you know, a black person who's deconstructing their religion, it's likely to be very different from the typical white experience in deconstruction. That's mainly because in a lot of cases the the church community's significance is different for a lot, a lot of white Americans, they can church hop and they can leave a church because they don't like the pastor or they have a disagreement on theology. But in other communities, the church is much more deeply part of a person's support system, yeah. You know, and frankly, it doesn't matter what the theology, I mean, the theology is or how bad the sermon is, because it there's something uh the community is like the core of it, yeah. Right. So there is that intersectionality piece. The other universal thing seems to be that a lot of people so I tend to think of religious deconstruction now not as a theological issue, but as a human development issue. Because a lot of people who leave religion, they tend to have some common human development deficits. Some of them would be a lack of critical thinking skills, delayed emotional development, and an inadequate base of human development knowledge, a real confusion about their, you know, their gender identity. Um, there's probably a lot of sexual uh malady that's often true for many people who leave religion. There's a lot of kind of developmental deficits. And if you don't address those, what'll happen as a person, it'll be like you said a rinse and repeat. Like we followed the religious guru, you know, pastor whoever, or the great Christian writer, the whatever church pastor. Okay, we leave all that, and then we just find the new progressive Christian leader or writer or the the new atheist personality, or you we just it's the same human development deficit, which is that you've not really solidified a strong sense of inner agency, and there's sort of like a spiritual codependence that you just kind of take around and you hook up, yeah. You know, it totally makes sense to whatever. Yeah, you're still not maybe thinking for yourself deeply, you're still not generating it from the inside out. Yeah, you're you're still depending on an external source to sort of figure it out for you.

Jeromy Johnson 37:46

And to give validation, right? Like we we really seek this validation. Like, I need someone to let me know that what I believe is right, versus just going, look, this is what I believe, and doesn't matter to you, quite frankly, unless I let it affect you, right?

Jim Palmer 38:01

But there are a lot of people, a lot of people leave Western religion and they get enamored with eastern spirituality. Let's say Buddhism, for example. And so you could do the same thing. I mean, like, I view Buddhism as a philosophy that has a lot of value, you know, but you can turn it into a religion just like you do anything and become a fundamentalist Buddhist and you know, become dependent on that system. You know, you can just like repeat the dynamic anywhere that you go. And so you kind of have to do some of that deeper developmental work.

Jeromy Johnson 38:36

Jim, I feel like we're just tiptoeing in the shallow waters of what you do and what we can talk about. I would love to spend hours and just dive more with that. And maybe that's that's a whole nother conversation because I would there's so many questions that pop up in my mind that I would love to go down and rabbit hole. I think probably your audience and my audience are are pretty similar. Um, I mean, you don't get away with the name like Slutty Grace and not have us an audience that's probably re-haphessing. I know I told my rethinking things.

Jim Palmer 39:05

I told my wife, she's like, What podcast you could be on? I'm like slutty grace, and she's like, What? That was kind of funny.

Jeromy Johnson 39:14

You know, as we were talking about Jesus, I think that the majority of people that were around him and did not like him felt that his grace, that his love, that his embrace was way too slutty for them. You know, you just look at scripture and the gospels, and he was touching people you're not supposed to touch, and he's healing people you're not supposed to heal, and he's forgiving people you're not supposed to forgive. And and then I really do feel like that God's grace just it it extends to all, and it's without caveat. And I'll let people decide on if I'm calling God slutty or not. Um I don't think I am, but some people do, and that's okay. They can think what they want. But Jim, I want to give you give you the last word to to those that are listening. Um what do you want them to hear you say? What do you want them to come away with?

Jim Palmer 40:08

I think maybe one thing would be is if you are questioning what you were taught about God, or what you heard in church, or the beliefs that you've been following for a number of years, and if you started questioning that, or you're someone who has started to distance yourself from them and you know, you're worried, oh my gosh, am I backsliding? Is you, you know, am I like on the fast track to hell? Or you're someone who's really struggling because you know what you don't believe anymore, but you're not quite sure what you do. Whatever forward it is that you might be experiencing here in a historical greed, faith, or part of the problem. We've lost a lot by leaving. This has changed a very close relationship. Is there an identity to you? What happens with the guy might be exposed to the other thing? The good news with that is that it's not that that's been volatile and destable with you. I have to really transformational change in the very stuff that you're happening at your deepest level of the things that you might have left or the things that you're questioning, are not little things, right? They're not like, you know, what are you gonna have for breakfast? They're things like is there a God? Who is that God? What happens when you die? What's true? Uh what are my beliefs? What's the meaning and purpose of life? And so the good news with that is even though that that's painful and volatile and destabilizing, I the hopeful thing is that it's some really deep transformational change in the very substructures of who you are. You know, this is it's a threshold. All the volatility, the loneliness, the difficulty, the heartache, the grief, the loss, all of that is a threshold. A lot of people are in that place. A lot of people are walking through that themselves. So you're not alone. And it's completely normal to feel all the things that you might be feeling. Have faith in life. Have faith in the process. You know, have faith in living one day into the next thing and letting the process unfold for you. And know that there's a lot of people who support you, love you, accept you, don't expect any performance from you or any certainty from you, or any need for you to figure out or know all the answers, or plenty of people like that also in the world. Um, I'm sure Jeremy is one of them where you can find people who are not gonna like issue you belonging based on certainty and performance, but purely out of care and love. Um, there are people like that in the world. Jeremy's one of them. There's people like that in the center. There, there's a lot of people that are in this place. So I just want to kind of encourage you to have compassion on yourself.

Jeromy Johnson 42:57

Jim, bless you for for all the work that that you're doing. I know it's uh Well things. And uh I really appreciate for all that you're doing in your heart for it, that you're really um helping people find find a new space, a new faith, possibly, or at least a new life.

Jim Palmer 43:18

Yeah. Well, I appreciate that. And I, you know, I'm really encouraged by what you're doing with the podcast and who you represent as a a person who talks about Jesus from a place of love and grace and acceptance. It's for sure the Jesus that we need in the world. You know, your message and the way that you reach out to people faces that meaning crisis and offers a safe space for people to, I think, to do their rebuilding. So I appreciate what you're doing.

Jeromy Johnson 43:47

Well, thank you, Jim. Thanks for coming on. Uh, I'd love to do this again.

Jim Palmer 43:51

And yeah, let's do it again.

Jeromy Johnson 43:53

All right, dude. Thanks, man. Have fun in Costa Rica. Don't let those dogs chew you up.

Jim Palmer 43:59

No, I appreciate it. Thanks, Jeremy. You hear those dogs barking?

Jeromy Johnson 45:00

I'm it sounds like there's a massive dog fight outside of your your house right now.

Jim Palmer 45:07

Oh gosh. They'll stop.

Jeromy Johnson 45:10

Are those your dogs or just neighborhood dogs?

Jim Palmer 45:12

No neighborhood dogs.