Andrew Sullivan answers the question 'What's So Great About Christianity?' so:
Er: that it's true?OK, his answer takes the form of a question, but I was made uneasy by the suggestion it nonetheless contains and I was trying to figure out why it should make me uneasy.
It isn't that anyone who claims that a belief of theirs is true is on the road to becoming a totalitarian monster, ready to imprison you for your contrary beliefs. Believing that something is true is perfectly compatible with holding that no one should have the truth - or the supposed truth - forced upon them. You can believe Christianity is true without wanting to put unbelievers to the sword.
Let's try something else. Christianity, even if true, isn't true in the way that it's true to the best of our knowledge that the earth is spherical and rotates around the sun, or in the way that it's true that the world's population has grown since the time of Jesus of Nazareth. It isn't an evidence-based kind of truth, one that we hold provisionally on the basis of the state of human knowledge, and always subject to the possibility of disproof or correction in the light of new evidence.
And it also doesn't have the kind of rough and ready truth that those of a democratic cast of mind sometimes attribute to their political outlooks, whether as conservatives, liberals, socialists or what have you. I call this kind of truth rough and ready to indicate that people often subscribe to a political outlook in a fairly open way, considering it better than the alternatives on balance, without necessarily wanting to deny that such alternatives may contain resources and insights which the one they favour lacks.
The claim that Christianity - or any other religion - is true is a matter, instead, of faith, and it is usually meant in both a fixed and monopolistic or exclusivist sense. There is no evidence, as far as I'm aware, that would refute the thought that Jesus Christ was the son of God. At the same time, if he was the son of God, then to other outlooks that deny this would-be truth, no truth can be allowed. I don't know if the faith by which the believer 'knows' Christianity to be true is to be thought of as something a person receives, or as something which they give, or both; but in any case it doesn't seem to be altogether well, morally speaking, for those of us who haven't received the gift of faith or haven't found it in ourselves to give it. Either we haven't been blessed with it, or we haven't chosen it, but we live outside the sole truth on a matter of the most incomparable importance. We must surely be lesser mortals for that.
Can the claim that Christianity is true be made without these rather damaging implications?