The funny thing is that going by the numbers, many of the religious people in your community likely question their faith and might be privately atheist or agnostic themselves.

Church pews are full of people like that.

It might even be worth asking if some of the hostile responses (not all of them, of course) arise from a sense of jealousy that you've chosen the freedom to live your life as you choose, free of the superstitious nonsense that rules them.

I grew up in the kind of community you're describing, well, more than one such community. Discovering that I was gay in a place where church attendance was all but socially mandatory, my life was hell on earth.

Then, when I was 16, I could no longer tolerate the dissonance between the science I was learning at school and the superstition pushed in church. I was no longer able to believe that the Bible was literally true, that evolution doesn't happen, etc. I'll never forget the joy and freedom I felt lying in bed one night when it hit me like a stroke of lightning: religion is bullshit, the stuff they're teaching in church is nonsense for fools. The idea that most of humanity is burning in hell is just scary stories made up by controlling, judgemental, bullying assholes.

And of course, as an extra special bonus, I got to understand that I wasn't a depraved sinner like those assholes were trying to insist. (I barely escaped being sent to a conversion therapy camp.)

It was only later in life than I discovered that other religious denominations aren't as foul as the ones I was raised in.

Sadly, Evangelical Christians and other conservative Christians are in a very distinct majority in the United States. Religious communities in the United States who accept others with open arms and no moral judgment are few and far between.

And that makes me so delighted that I'm an atheist and don't have to put up with the bullshit, that I don't sit in a pew and pretend for the sake of getting along.