ChristianMusic

It's weird because either 1) it's written to appeal to the anti-"worldly" crowd or 2) trying to actively promote Christianity; doing music as a form of missionary work.

Imagine I made a "Los Angeles band" and all my music was just promoting LA and talking about how great LA is and how much you should take a vacation to LA and I namedrop a bunch of local places and businesses and just cram it in everywhere I can... It would probably be pretty shit music, wouldn't it?

I've listened to good Christian bands but the best tend not to push it as a central theme in their music. Every so often there's something that has a Christian message or themes but doesn't come off as cultish bullshit, like some stuff from Immortal Technique and Nina Simone (just happen to be at the top of my mind ATM); but it's really rare and it's usually very intense / meaningful / personal which carries with it an authenticity that's usually lacking from Christian music.

Just the sheer amount of secular music vs christian music is going to skew the stats. Its like saying why does this group of 1000 have more musical chops than these 100?

At a minimum, its a question of numbers.

But besides that, the audience for music from that 100, want a certain thing from them, so that's what they try to deliver. Its not about breaking new ground musically.

There's a huge amount of excellent Christian classical music, partly because the Church (or people who wanted to be in good with the Church) could afford to pay for someone like Mozart or Bach or Handel to write it. And there's also great Gospel music from people who just had to sing their soul out, that's Christian music too. Sure, some Christian music is plodding, either because it's written for everyday folks to be able to sing, or because congregations are too charitable to criticize mediocre performers. And some bands, when they grow as musicians, also grow beyond the boundaries of Christian music. But to dismiss the whole genre is a bit much.