THIS IS AMERICA
Dragons, Conspiracies, and the Suspension of Disbelief
What happens when believing in the unbelievable goes haywire
About a year before we moved to the island where we currently reside, we lived in Fuquay-Varina, a small town outside Raleigh, North Carolina. I’d recently started writing for a capital markets research firm, and my wife had a “real job” managing a Williams Sonoma in Raleigh.
We got lucky — we found a lovely house on a quiet street. Our neighbors had children the same age as our children — one family even had a backyard trampoline. My wife and I carpooled our kids to school with the family across the street. But unlike the neighborhood we left behind in Edgewater, New Jersey, filled with people from around the world, our biracial family was the only non-white family on the block.
How, I asked myself, could anyone believe something so objectively false? I didn’t know it at the time, but this incident was a sign of things to come.
Despite the homogeneity, our kids made new friends, and our adult neighbors seemed friendly. But after a few weeks, we realized we lived in an entire neighborhood of evangelical Christians. Our first…
