A recent report has revealed that today’s popular Christian music is decidedly more positive than negative.
According to RelevantMagazine.com, the data for the study was collected by Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, a site operated by ESPN which specializes in analyzing data using math.
The analytics specialists at FiveThirtyEight recently decided to analyze how upbeat modern Christian music is. Consistent with what many fans have acknowledged, contemporary Christian music was found to be “unrelentingly cheerful.”
Those analyzing the data “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.”
The analysts then looked at specific words such as “grace” and “sin” and measured how many times each were used in popular Christian songs.
They found that Christian songwriters use “grace” 2.5 times more than “sin,” “life” eight times more than “death,” and “love” seven times more than “fear.”
The study also found that, compared to Christian music of the 1800’s, today Christian music was much more positive. Although older hymns and Christian songs still were positive and upbeat overall, they contained more references to sin, judgment, sorrow, and darkness than contemporary Christian songs.
Photo courtesy: Thinkstockphotos.com
Publication date: June 3, 2016
