A Dairy Queen, a Subway, three dollar stores, a strip of half-empty storefronts along Main Street: you could hardly call it a community, where I grew up in rural Kentucky. Or rather, it didn’t feel like a community to me. Such hospitality was reserved for a narrow category of humanity, resembling as closely as possible those local barons whose surnames crusted the stones of local cemeteries. In this case, that meant you had to be white, athletic, anti-intellectual, and Christian. Article continues after advertisement I ticked off the first of these boxes. That kept me safer than many. Still, I’d long ago learned to hide the fact that I grew up an atheist. A cadre of grade schoolers had taught me that this fatal flaw was a rot at my core. Nothing could redeem it. I spoke in class and academic team, but outside of these structured spheres, sank into such silence that I often believed myself to be actually invisible. What friends I made, I couldn’t trust enough to keep.…