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If this focus on buying and consuming is the culmination of centuries of progress in determining our needs and desires and satisfying them with earned wealth, then this trend is to be applauded. If, however, it comes from Americans’ being “manipulated into participating in a dumbed-down, artificial consumer culture, which yield[s] few true human satisfactions,”33 then it is a significant social loss.

Religiosity. The most despised people in America are atheists. Notwithstanding the popularity that defenses of atheism enjoy at the bookstore (see The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins or God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens) or on Netflix (Religulous by Bill Maher), it is still the atheist who consistently tops the Gallup Poll list of people Americans would refuse to vote for. Another study conducted by the University of Minnesota found that respondents ranked atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians, and all other minority groups in who was perceived to share “their vision of American society.” Americans are also less willing to allow their children to marry atheists than any other group.34

Religious belief is embedded in our everyday lives. Religious statements are inscribed on our money, and religious institutions occupy valuable real estate in our cities and towns. We begin sessions of Congress with a prayer, start Supreme Court arguments with a cry that “God save the United States and this honorable Court,” and commemorate presidential inaugurations with a national prayer before hundreds of thousands of celebrants. Every calendar year culminates in the celebration of holidays—Thanksgiving and Christmas—that are religious in meaning and origin.

Most Americans have not moved from their childhood faith. If you include in this group people who have merely shifted from one Protestant denomination to another, more than 70 percent of Americans currently profess the religion in which they were raised.35 Another study found similar results, concluding that “nearly three out of every four American adults said they are the same religious faith today as they were during their childhood. That means the most common faith journey that people take is to form spiritual commitments as children and teenagers that typically last for the duration of their life.”36

The reason for this consistency may be that each of us believes he or she has found the Truth. The search for that truth, personal or collective, needs to be protected and encouraged. But the insistence on religiosity may be less a product of rigorous search than of multigenerational habit and socialization. No reasonable God would expect that, and no society is well served by it.

Gender roles. Notwithstanding the advances in gender equality over the past generation and the courageous ground-breaking by numerous men and women, our culture continues to serve up generous helpings of tradition and hierarchy when it comes to the roles of men and women inside and outside the home. Try this the next time you watch television: actually watch the commercials. Take special note of commercials about the home—anything about appliances, food, cleaning products, or children. Every one of them assumes that the woman of the house prepares the frozen pizza for the family, nurses sick children with motherly love and VapoRub, mops the kitchen floor with a Swiffer, and pretreats the kids’ grass stains before she washes and dries the clothes. In commercials as well as television sitcoms and dramas, women drive cars only when men are not available. In crime dramas, women disproportionately are the victims rather than the heroes.

This does not affect only women. Men are assumed not to be caretakers of their kids. When I go to parent-teacher conferences with my son and his mom, most teachers address their comments to her. When he is sick and we take him to the clinic, most doctors talk to her as the principal decision maker. In divorce proceedings in most states, the presumption is that the kids will stay