Is Christianity a Materialist Faith?

I've been involved, albeit  peripherally, in a debate about the relationship between psychotherapy and the Christian faith.  It is on the Premier Christian Radio site and as usual the discussion took some unintended twists and turns.  This one included a fascinating discussion about materialism. 

It started as one of those futile exchanges between atheists and Christians about which has caused most violence.  This can get a bit futile as neither side is prepared to accept the other's examples or that all people are prone to violence.

I read this exchange and remarked that the word materialist was being used rather indiscriminately by the Christians to mean in effect atheist (and so the sole cause of the worst of twentieth century wars and persecutions).  I pointed out some Christians are materialists; on reflection I meant Christianity is a materialist faith.

I don't mean materialism in the sense of individuals who care solely for consumer goods and the accumulation of wealth.  Also, I do not mean the philosophical position taken by many atheists that there is a material world that is solely responsible for everything we know.  Consciousness itself cannot be accounted for by matter alone.

I mean there is no distinction, from where we stand as human beings, between matter and spirit.  This is not a denial of some sort of spiritual reality nor is it a refusal to accept the findings of modern science.

It seems to me the doctrine of incarnation is essentially materialist.  God loves matter.  We believe God creates matter and why should God bother if it is evil?  It is the Gnostics who had a dualist view of matter and spirit, where matter is bad and spirit is good.  The Christian Church has always rejected this view, arguing that Jesus is God incarnated as a full human being. 

This puts Jesus, and therefore God, into a unique time and place.  Our faith is still one of here and now, rather than in heaven or the hereafter.

The Liberation Theologians in the 1970s were inspired by elements of Marxism, and found his dialectical materialism is at root a means to interrogate the here and now.  They found, as Christians have found time and again throughout their history, that it is the poor who suffer.  They were rejected by church and state because they sided with the poor.  They pointed out inequalities are anathema for God, and their Marxism was therefore used against them.

So, yes the Christian faith is materialist, unlike atheism which is not noted for its solidarity with the poor.