Published: Monday, June 11, 2012

By Bruce Nolan, The Times-Picayune

Among 325 or so atheists, agnostics, humanists and other nonbelievers gathered here at a convention of the American Humanist Association this weekend, Jerry DeWitt of DeRidder was just a face in the crowd. He did not get an award as Humanist of the Year, like Gloria Steinem. Nor is he an author or community activist promoting tolerance for nonbelievers, like many of the association’s better-known figures.

DeWitt, a former Pentecostal preacher from DeRidder, La., came to be an atheist while still preaching in the pulpit. He’s beginning to gain some prominence in humanist circles but is now shunned in his Beauregard Parish hometown.

But DeWitt, 42, is beginning to develop a national profile in the small universe of organized unbelievers, for he’s a rarity: a former preacher, an erstwhile Pentecostal pastor from small-town Louisiana who little by little lost his faith right there in the pulpit, even as he exhorted others to fervent belief.

Now DeWitt is out of the pulpit, and public about his nonbelief. He has begun to do a little speaking, telling his reverse-conversion story around the country before local humanist groups. More than that, he is the unpaid executive director of the Freedom From Religion Foundation and works with The Clergy Project, a website that invites and privately counsels other doubting pastors behind a password-protected firewall.

To read the rest of this Times-Picayune story, click here.