Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as presented in the New Testament writings of his early followers. It is the world's largest religion, with an estimated 2.1 billion followers, or about one-third of the world's population. It shares with Judaism the books of the Hebrew Bible (all of which are incorporated in the Old Testament), and for this reason is sometimes called an Abrahamic religion.
The central belief of Christianity is that by faith in the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus, individuals are saved from death—both spiritual and physical—by redemption from their sins (i.e., faults, misdeeds, disobedience, rebellion against God). Through God's grace, by faith and repentance, men and women are reconciled to God through forgiveness and by sanctification or theosis to return to their place with God in Heaven. Crucial beliefs in Christian teaching are Jesus' incarnation, 
atonement, crucifixion, and resurrection from the dead to redeem humankind from sin and death; and the belief that the New Testament is a part of the Bible. Many Christians today (and traditionally even more) also hold to supersessionism, the belief that Christianity is the fulfillment of Biblical Judaism. The emphasis on God the Father giving his son, or the Son (who is God) becoming incarnate for the sake of humanity, is an essential difference between Christianity and most other religions, where the emphasis is instead placed solely on humans working for salvation.
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Christianity encompasses numerous religious traditions that widely vary by culture, as well as many diverse beliefs and sects. It is usually represented as having divided into three main branches, over the past two millennia: 
Catholicism (including the largest coherent group, the Roman Catholic Church and Eastern Catholics, representing over one billion baptized members)
Eastern Christianity (including the second largest coherent group, the Eastern Orthodox Church, as well as the Old Oriental Churches)
Protestantism 
(Many denominations and schools of thought, including Anglicanism, Reformed, Lutheran, Methodist, Evangelicalism, Charismatics and Pentecostalism). These three broad divisions do not represent equally uniform branches. On the contrary, in some cases they disguise vast disagreements, and in other cases minimize sympathies that exist. But this is the convenient standard overview of distinctions, especially as Christianity has been viewed in the Western world.
A more comprehensive overview would categorize the Monophysite Old Oriental Churches and the Nestorian Assyrian Church of the East as branches distinct from the Chalcedonian Christianity of Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism, and Restorationism as a tradition separate from Protestantism, with which it has often been included.
In the 19th and 20th centuries many Christian nations, especially in Western Europe, became more secular. Most communist states were governed by avowed atheists, though only Albania was officially atheist. Adherents to Fundamentalist Christianity, particularly in the United States, also disagreed with new scientific estimates about the age of the Earth and the development of the concept of evolution.
Christianity Today According to Adherents.com, Christianity is the world's most widely practiced religion, with 2.1 billion adherents, including 1.1 billion Roman Catholics, 510 million Protestants in a number of traditions, 
216 million Orthodox, 158 million Independents (unaffiliated with the major streams of Christianity), and 31.7 million belonging to other groups (Jehovah's Witnesses, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Mormons, etc.).
These last denominations describe themselves as Christian but are not usually recognized as such by other denominations, because of their unorthodox teachings. Not all people identified as Christians accept all, or even most, of the theological positions held by their particular churches. Like the Jews, Christians in the West were greatly affected by The Age of Enlightenment in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
Perhaps the most significant change for them was total or effective separation of church and state, thus ending the state-sponsored Christianity that had existed in European countries. Now one could be a free member of society and disagree with one's church on issues, and one could be free to leave the church altogether. Many did, developing beliefs systems such as Deism, Unitarianism, and Universalism, or becoming atheists, agnostics, or humanists. Others created liberal wings of Protestant Christian theology. Modernism in the late 19th century encouraged new forms of thought and expression that did not follow traditional lines.
Reaction to the Enlightenment and Modernism triggered the development of literally thousands of Christian Protestant denominations, Roman traditionalist splinter groups of the Roman Catholic Church that do not recognize the legitimacy of many reforms the Roman Catholic Church has undertaken, and the growth of hundreds of fundamentalist groups that interpret the entire Bible in a more literal fashion. In Europe, and to a lesser extent the United States, liberalism has also led to increased secularism.
Some Christians have long since stopped participating in traditional religious duties, attending churches only on a few particular holy days per year or not at all. 
Many of them recall having highly religious grandparents, but grew up in homes where Christian theology was no longer a priority. They have developed ambivalent feelings towards their religious duties. On the one hand they cling to their traditions for identity reasons; on the other hand, the influence of the secular Western mentality, the demands of daily life, and peer pressure tear them away from traditional Christianity. Marriage between Christians of different denominations, or between a Christian and a non-Christian, was once taboo, but has become commonplace. Some traditionally Roman Catholic countries have largely become agnostic.
Christians often view Christianity as the fulfillment and successor of Judaism, and Christianity carried forward much of the doctrine and many of the practices from the Hebrew faith, including monotheism, the belief in a Messiah (or Christ from the Greek Christós, which means "anointed one") spoken of in prophecies, certain forms of worship (such as prayer, and reading from religious texts), a priesthood (although most Protestants assert the "priesthood of all believers" is the only valid priesthood today), and the idea that worship on Earth is modeled on worship in Heaven.
SACRED TEXT FROM THE BIBLE: (for the Christian Religion)
Psalm 42:
As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God?
My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, “Where is your God?”
These things I remember, as I pour out my soul: how I would go with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude keeping festival.
Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.
My soul is cast down within me; therefore I remember you from the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mizar.
Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your waves have gone over me.
By day the LORD commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.
I say to God, my rock: “Why have you forgotten me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?” As with a deadly wound in my bones, my adversaries taunt me, while they say to me all the day long, “Where is your God?”
Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.
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