Yes Atheist do live outside the Matrix. Remember where the true power was in the movie? In BELIEF. Belief in yourself, in love, in the ability to be remarkable without surrendering your body and mind to "the great powers". To me, the people living outside the Matrix symbolized everything thing that you stand to gain without religion, mainly the ability to be free to all possibilities in consciousness.

The difference between Christians / other believers in one god, and ourselves is that we believe in one less god.

If we believe a significant amount of the media then we are also in the matrix.

It works in some ways the other way around from the Matrix movie because the purpose of the Western World matrix is to make us deny all that is good and pay our weapons makers to destroy even whole nations that don't buy into our world view and therefore don't willingly obey us.

The problem with most Christians is that they don't believe their own high ideals, they don't believe in peace on Earth and they don't believe Philippians 4.8. And to them 'In god we trust' just means 'make more nukes'.

It certainly seems like they live in a bubble. A confusing one at that.

The answer is in your post, grasshopper. You've listed attributes of the observed behavior among these people, but all the ones after the first are supposed to be contrary to Christianity. At least for the first 300 years, Christians were not materialistic and definitely not patriotic. Something happened to make a change. If you want to call that going into the box, fine, that's a great metaphor. The box contains a very warped version of spirituality.

While we're on the subject, what really gets me is what's going on in Myanmar. How is it possible to have Buddhist Monks who are violently nationalistic?