Music and Religion

When I was growing up, I didn't really have any significant religious interventions. My parents are Unitarian Universalists, so the church we went to accepted everyone from pagans to atheists to recovering Catholics. We would sing a lot of varied music for the services-- a fair amount of folk songs or more earthy pieces, some more traditional church hymns, and spirituals. I never really attached religious meaning to any of these songs because I wasn't brought up in a religious household. My dad's side of the family is very Catholic. My great uncle is a Catholic Priest and my grandma is very religious. I went with her to a few Catholic masses, and the chant like music we sang there fascinated me. It was hauntingly beautiful and had much more meaning than the religious music I was used to. The people in the mass there took it much more seriously and had everything memorized.
I started working for St Paul United Methodist Church in the fall of my sophomore year of college. We sing a lot each service-- three hymns and an anthem. The vast majority of the hymns we sing are the typical plagal cadence, 4 line numbers. These hymns are easy to sing-- conjunct motion, easy to hear final cadences-- for the people that aren't interested in being challenged musically. The anthems we sing are more creative, but still don't hold a specific meaning for me. I tend to think that some people find the music gratifying and others just find it cumbersome-- it's become rote for almost every church service in the western world.
I'm convinced that the church has greatly influenced the production and development of music, especially since the invention of the German chorale. Singing in church gave people a way to be practically musical and involved in their religious experience (especially in the western world). As we saw with the Native Americans, music was a direct link between them and their deity (deities). I think that the same can be said about western religious music, I just never really felt that way personally. Because religious music was a very common form of music and one of the only ways most people were musical for a long time, it has had the drive to be developed more than secular types of music and has experienced a lot of change over time. There will always be a market for and people who want to compose religious music, and that security gives that music a weight that secular music doesn't possess.