Arguably the most powerful latent teaching in many faith traditions is the exhortation to avoid preoccupation with wealth and materialism. Excessive consumption is the engine that runs the world's most powerful economies, and the arguments used to resist it—it is bad for the environment, and often bad for human health—have made only small dents in the trend. Religions are in a position to weigh in more strongly with the spiritual and moral case against excessive consumption: that it diverts attention from the most important goals of life, and that it squanders resources that might be used to help the poor. And beyond preaching, they could become more active in the community by sponsoring neighborhood groups that seek to promote simplicity and by otherwise offering support to those who seek to live simply.

Whether we have religious tendencies or not, Alain de Botton says it is worth dwelling on just how much Christianity has always had to say about status, and how consoling its message has long been for many of those most beset by status worries. Christianity bids us look beneath our surface differences and focus on a number of universal truths.

At the centre of the Christian thesis is the curious-sounding claim (entirely alien to a modern, secular world-view) that one's status carries no moral connotations, that what you do.  In other words, says strictly nothing about who you are. Jesus was the highest man, but he was a carpenter. Pilate was an important imperial official, but a sinner. It therefore made no sense, Christianity argued, to believe that one's place in the social hierarchy reflected actual qualities.

Another helpful, status-anxiety-reducing feature of Christianity is its emphasis on the vanity of earthly things. Because this life is only a prelude to a far more important next life, Christian writers have tended to downplay the importance of what happens on earth: who gets what job, who goes to what party and so on. In Christian lands during the 16th century, it became fashionable for people to buy pictures that featured skulls and an hourglass, laid down in the middle of symbols of frivolity and worldly glory (soap bubbles, candles, mandolins). The purpose of these 'vanitas' paintings was to remind their owners of their (relatively) imminent deaths and so encourage them to give up pursuing fame and riches, while at the same time to push them to attend more seriously to love, goodness, sincerity, humility and kindness. It's true that before a skeleton, others' opinions do have a habit of shedding their powers of intimidation. The thought of death can bring authenticity to social life.

Aside from reflecting on our own mortality, it can also be a relief from status anxiety to dwell on the death of other people, in particular on the death of those whose achievements are now apt to leave us feeling most inadequate and envious,  However forgotten and ignored we are, however powerful and revered others may be. we can take comfort from the thought that everyone will ultimately end up as that most democratic of substances: dust. The message might seem a melancholy one. but arguably more so for those currently anchoring their lives around the pleasures of a high-status position than for those ignored by society and therefore already well acquainted with the oblivion that their privileged counterparts will eventually be accorded. It is the rich, the beautiful, the famous and the powerful to whom death has the cruellest lessons to teach, the very categories of people whose worldly goods take them, in the Christian understanding, furthest from God.

Christian moralists have hence long understood that to reassure the anxious it may be best to emphasise that we will die, everyone we love will vanish and all our achievements and even our names will be stamped into the ground. If the idea brings comfort, it may be because something within us instinctively recognises how closely our miseries are bound up with the grandiosity of our ambitions. To consider our petty status worries from the perspective of a thousand years hence is to be granted a rare, tranquillising glimpse of our own insignificance.

Christianity has a final consoling line to offer. According to one influential wing of modern secular society, there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being 'like everyone else'; for 'everyone else' is a category that comprises the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right- thinking people should be to mark themselves out from the crowd and 'stand out' in whatever way their talents allow. But being like everyone else is not, to follow Christian thought, any sort of calamity, for it was one of Jesus's central claims that all human beings, including the slow-witted, the untalented and the obscure, are creatures of God and loved by Him - and are hence deserving of the honour owed to every example of the Lord's work. Christianity bids us look beneath the surface differences between people in order to focus on what it considers to be a number of universal truths on which a sense of community and kinship can be built. Some of us may be cruel or impatient, dim or dull, but what should detain and bind us together is the recognition of shared  vulnerabilities. Beneath our flaws, there are always two ingredients: fear and a desire for love.

To encourage fellow-feeling, Jesus urged us to learn to look at grown-ups as we might look at children. Few things can more quickly transform our sense of someone's character than to picture them as a child. From this perspective, we are more ready to express the sympathy and generosity we almost naturally display towards the young, whom we call naughty rather than bad, and cheeky rather than arrogant. Nothing could be more noble, or more fully human - the Christian line goes - than to perceive that we are indeed fundamentally just like everyone else.

Christianity did not, of course, ever succeed in abolishing worldly values. However, if we retain a distinction between wealth and virtue and still ask of people whether they are good rather than simply important, it is in large part due to the impression left upon Western consciousness by a religion which, for centuries, lent its resources and prestige to the defence of a handful of extraordinary ideas about the rightful distribution of status.

In so doing, Christianity helped to lend legitimacy to those who, in every generation, will be unable or unwilling to follow dutifully behind the dominant notions of high status, but who may yet deserve to be categorised other than under the brutal epithets of 'loser' or 'nobody'.