Out of Darkness Into Light

The Bible encourages us to live by the Word, and worship will necessarily be part of that life that is
expressed according to God's truth. Colossians 3 says:
16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.
17 And whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.

Music can be such an important component of building our relationship with God - the Scriptures are replete with references about singing to the Lord.  In worship, as we humble ourselves before Him, we have the promise that He will inhabit our praises; James says that humility to God will bring exaltation, I believe, in the form of lifted spirits and released burdens.  Our view of God can be altered as we sing or listen to songs that exalt His name, expressing Who He is and what He has done and desires to do in our lives.

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In Psalm 98, we are encouraged to worship the Lord through song:
(1) Oh, sing to the Lord a new song! For He has done marvelous things; His right hand and His holy arm have gained Him the victory.
2 The Lord has made known His salvation; His righteousness He has revealed in the sight of the nations.

If you follow politics and polling, you've probably encountered the name Nate Silver, who started the website FiveThirtyEight.  The Relevant Magazine site says that FiveThirtyEight "...is operated by ESPN, but was started by statistics and analytics mastermind Nate Silver, a man with a talent for using math to predict the outcomes of elections."  Relevant reports that the site “took a look at the last five years of Billboard’s year-end top 50 Christian songs” to find “pairs of concepts across the entire collection of lyrics (life and death, grace and sin, etc.) and calculated the ratio of positive to negative words.”

How interesting - among predictions of Presidential election trends, Major League Baseball and NBA probabilities, and more, you have a survey of Christian music.  Oh, please, tell me more...

The summary, according to Relevant:

Their findings: Christian songwriters use far more positive words than negative ones. “Grace” was 2.5 times more common than “sin”; life was eight times more common than “death”; love was seven times more common than “fear.”

Interestingly, compared to Christian music of the 1800s, a genre known as shape note, today's most popular Christian songs are noticeably more cheerful—and contain a lot fewer references to sin. Though the older hymns and church songs were still more positive than negative, they contained far more mentions of concepts like sin, judgement, sorrow and darkness than what’s heard on today’s CCM stations.

The FiveThirtyEight article offers some analysis from Richard Beck, a psychology professor at Abilene Christian University, who says that when Christian pop songs and hymns are “excessively positive or wholly positive,” they often “come across as cotton candy and inauthentic."  He says that some, whom he calls "Winter Christians," whose lives are "touched by pain, distance, or doubt," may not can relate to "uniformly upbeat themes in worship."

Filmmaker Matt Hinton, a former religion professor at Morehouse College, is referrred to in the article: "Hinton sees the darker themes of shape note as integral to Christian worship. Mixing in negative language makes it easier to tell the positive story of salvation, Hinton said."

My takeaway from this article, on the surface, produces for me a bit of a "so what?" attitude.  If there's 2.5 times more grace than sin, statistically, is that a bad thing?  I contend not, but I would exercise a word of caution.  I have been critical of vague things in Christian music - the references to a vague "third-party," the "Jesus is my boyfriend-y" attitude that the FiveThirtyEight article refers to, quoting David Stowe, who claims that Christian music is not as negative as it used to be.  I'd say that even songs that don't carry a reference to Jesus or God specifically, i.e., Amazing Grace, can carry a strong meaning. But we do need to make sure our song choices line up Biblically.

I believe that worship music can provide a number of functions for us.  One is that it allows us to connect with God - if we are singing about Him or listening to songs that exalt Him, we can gain a greater awareness of His presence.  But, there is also music that has lyrics that can help us to learn more about God and even to grow in Him.  The hymns have been lauded as great containers of Christian theology, and can teach us about these concepts of the redemption that we have in Jesus Christ.

I agree that we need to focus on a wide variety of aspects of our theology, and we need to be rooted in it.  But, I think ultimately, our music should leave us hopeful, if not introspective.  There may be times when we need to pour our hearts out to God, and a song can perhaps touch us deeply and help us to do that, embracing somewhat darker or more weighty themes.   Music is a powerful tool that God has given to us in order to experience Him more fully.