I am not sure how to say “what Christianity means to me,” because Christianity is at the root of how I understand meaning. It is the tradition—comprising stories, ideas, words, practices, and institutions—in which I live and make sense of my life and the world. I can see that there are other traditions, which by which other people make sense of their lives and the world, but this one is mine.
Likewise, “why I believe in it” is sort of a strange question, which I cannot really answer without first addressing the problem that “believe” is a word with many complex uses. In this context, I suspect you mean “believe in it” in the sense of “expressly affirm the truth of certain propositions of fact,” or something like that. But that is not a meaning that makes sense to me in this context. As I mentioned above, Christianity is something much thicker than just a set of propositions. How could one “believe in” a practice for example? One might have certain beliefs about a practice, but those are not necessarily the reasons why one participates in it. Likewise, a story can be deeply meaningful without being “believed” in that sense. (I like to point to all the people who find the Star Wars universe deeply meaningful, for example, as manifested in the way it shapes their lives. But they know it is imaginary.)
But there is an older sense of “belief,” which we often use in other contexts, which is to have confidence in, or even—in perhaps a very old sense—to love. For example, we say to a loved one who is about to face a challenge, “I believe in you.” In that sense of “believe,” I have confidence in Christianity for the same reason that I am able to answer the first question as I did: because it grounds my sense of meaning for both my life and the world.
I am not sure how to say “what Christianity means to me,” because Christianity is at the root of how I understand meaning. It is the tradition—comprising stories, ideas, words, practices, and institutions—in which I live and make sense of my life and the world. I can see that there are other traditions, which by which other people make sense of their lives and the world, but this one is mine.
Likewise, “why I believe in it” is sort of a strange question, which I cannot really answer without first addressing the problem that “believe” is a word with many complex uses. In this context, I suspect you mean “believe in it” in the sense of “expressly affirm the truth of certain propositions of fact,” or something like that. But that is not a meaning that makes sense to me in this context. As I mentioned above, Christianity is something much thicker than just a set of propositions. How could one “believe in” a practice for example? One might have certain beliefs about a practice, but those are not necessarily the reasons why one participates in it. Likewise, a story can be deeply meaningful without being “believed” in that sense. (I like to point to all the people who find the Star Wars universe deeply meaningful, for example, as manifested in the way it shapes their lives. But they know it is imaginary.)
But there is an older sense of “belief,” which we often use in other contexts, which is to have confidence in, or even—in perhaps a very old sense—to love. For example, we say to a loved one who is about to face a challenge, “I believe in you.” In that sense of “believe,” I have confidence in Christianity for the same reason that I am able to answer the first question as I did: because it grounds my sense of meaning for both my life and the world.