How do you answer an atheist who says religion only matters to people with full pockets and full stomachs?

He has it exactly backwards. The people whose pockets are empty and whose stomachs are not full are the ones who turn to God instinctively. Comfort is what makes a man think he does not need religion. He has it backwards, and not by a little. Ask yourself the plain question. If your stomach is full and your pockets are full, why would you worry about religion at all? You already have everything you think you need. It is the man who is poor, and the man who is hungry, who turns to God, and he does it instinctively, without anybody talking him into it. Our Lord said the same thing, and He was blunter than I am. "How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God" (Mark 10:23). He said that after watching a man with great wealth walk away sad, because the one thing he was asked to give up was the one thing he could not part with. That is not a statement about economics. It is a statement about what full pockets do to a soul. They insulate it. They make God look optional. The Beatitudes begin with the poor, not the comfortable, and there is a reason. So the atheist has built his objection on a premise that history flatly contradicts. Where has the faith been strongest? In the catacombs, in the persecutions, in the slums, in the missions, among people with nothing. Where is it weakest today? In the richest nations on earth. If religion were a luxury good, the pattern would run the other way, and it does not. Now, what I suspect he is really reaching for is the old Marxist line that religion is the opium of the masses, a comfort invented to pacify the miserable. Notice that this is the opposite of the argument he actually made. He cannot have both. Either faith is the indulgence of the well fed or it is the anesthetic of the starving. It is neither, and the fact that atheists reach for whichever one is handy tells you they are not arguing from evidence. They are arguing from a conclusion they held before they started. Here is what I would say next, once his objection collapses. The question of God is not a question about who finds religion emotionally useful. It is a question of fact. Either matter is eternal and made itself, or Someone made it. Get him to admit that both are at least possibilities. Most honest men will, because logically they cannot deny it. Then say to him: you are betting your existence on the first one, and you have just told me you do not know. That is a serious wager to make on a coin you admit you cannot see. And I go further than that, because St. Paul does. Romans 1:18 to 20 says the invisible things of God have been clearly seen through what has been made, His eternal power and Godhead, so that men are without excuse. Paul does not say men may fail to notice God. He says the evidence is plain to them and they suppress it by their wickedness. On those grounds I say there are no atheists. Every man knows God exists, and that is exactly why God can judge him. This is the teleological argument, the argument from design. It is the last of Aquinas's five ways and to my mind the strongest, because it is the one the Apostle himself uses. One last piece of practical advice. Arguments are not the only tool. If I had the man for a week I would not spend it all on syllogisms. I would take him to Lourdes and show him St. Bernadette lying in her glass case looking as fresh as the day she was thirty, dead over a hundred and fifty years. I would take him to Italy and show him the Eucharistic miracles where the host became flesh and the tissue tested out as human heart muscle with a blood type. Then I would say, all right, now do you want to open the Bible and find out where all of this comes from? Some men need the argument first. Some need to be stopped in their tracks by something they cannot explain away, and then the argument follows. Do not let him set the terms. He offered you a sociological sneer, not an argument. Answer it in one sentence, then put the real question to him: who made this?