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Blog / How “Happy” Is Christianity? Exploring Moods in Christian Music and the Bible

How “Happy” Is Christianity? Exploring Moods in Christian Music and the Bible

Is the message of Christianity more upbeat than it is negative? Most Christians would likely answer that the core message of Christianity—grace given to man through Jesus Christ—is an overwhelmingly positive one, although to fully appreciate the extent of that good news, it’s necessary to acknowledge some bad news along the way: human sin and the ongoing struggles of life in an imperfect world.

But how does that balance of positive and negative themes manifest in actual Christian worship? This is a question raised by Leah Libresco’s recent analysis of mood in contemporary Christian worship music. She found that positive and cheerful words dramatically outnumber negative ones in the lyrics of the top 50 Christian pop songs.

Libresco also applied the same analysis to older Christian music—specifically the “shape note” approach of music writers in the 19th century that produced many famous hymns—and found that contemporary Christian music is much more lyrically positive than Christian music from past centuries. Older Christian music still tended toward the positive, but balanced opposing concepts like life/death and sin/grace more evenly. Filmmaker and former religion professor Michael Hinton notes that the negativity of older Christian music actually highlighted the ultimately positive message by providing a contrast:

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. He sees shape-note texts as placing “a profound emphasis upon grace.” And because of that emphasis on grace, “there’s an emphasis on the reality of sin,” Hinton said.

Taking this approach further, what would happen if we tried to gauge the positivity or negativity of the Bible itself? Several years ago, Bible Gateway’s Stephen Smith conducted a “sentiment analysis” of the entire Bible to measure positive and negative sentiments in Scripture. Click on the image below to see the results:

Enlarge this chart of the sentiment analysis of the entire Bible

Do the results surprise you? Do they challenge your understanding of the Bible as a primarily “happy” or “sad” text? Do you think the emotional diversity of the Bible is accurately reflected in our worship today?

Filed under Bible, Worship