Over at my day job, I\u2019ve done an analysis of contemporary Christian music and traditional shape-note hymns<\/a>.<\/p>\n I took a look at the last five years of Billboard\u2019s year-end<\/a> top 50 Christian songs1<\/sup><\/a> to see whether Christian pop is unrelentingly cheerful. I looked at pairs of concepts across the entire collection of lyrics2<\/sup><\/a> (life and death, grace and sin, etc.)3<\/sup><\/a> and calculated the ratio of positive to negative words. For every pair I checked, positive words were far more common than negative ones.<\/p>\n There were 2.5 times as many mentions of \u201cgrace\u201d as \u201csin\u201d in the songs\u2019 lyrics. Other pairs were even more lopsided: There were more than eight mentions of \u201clife\u201d for every instance of \u201cdeath,\u201d and \u201clove\u201d was more than seven times as common as \u201cfear.\u201d (For the record, John 4:18 \u2014 \u201cperfect love casts out fear\u201d \u2014 is advice for spiritual formation, not lyrics writing.) Parishioners may find too much positive language dispiriting. When Christian pop songs and hymns are \u201cexcessively positive or wholly positive,\u201d they often \u201ccome across as cotton candy and inauthentic,\u201d said Richard Beck, a psychology professor at Abilene Christian University and the author of several<\/a> books<\/a> on the intersection between theology and psychology.<\/p>\n