The message in the music: a content analysis of contemporary Christian and southern gospel song lyrics

In order to better understand the controversy that has surrounded the growth of contemporary Christian music, music with a gospel message set to a rock beat, a content analysis was undertaken of twenty-seven Christian rock songs and thirty-one country gospel songs, drawn from the I986 top ten chart listings of Contemporary Christian Music and Singing News, respectively.

It was hypothesized that the contemporary Christian lyrics would reflect an evangelical-pentecostal-charismatic doctrinal perspective and that the country gospel songs would reflect a Calvinist, fundamentalist perspective. Coders were to mark the presence of any of fifty-eight doctrinal themes.

Additionally, the codeform contained items from Singletary's I983 content analysis of secular rock, country and soul lyrics. Items included lyrical sophistication, redundancy, use of semantic devices, presence of social comment, and contentedness with life, among others.

The doctrinal hypothesis for country gospel was only conditionally supported, in that that sample's lyrics were found to be basically orthodox, leaning toward Calvinism.

Contemporary Christian music was found to be almost devoid of doctrinal content in any direction. In light of perceived differences between the two music styles in regard to performance venues and environment, as well as target audiences, it was deemed that further research is called for to understand the results.