Another whine I have to do on this topic is as a music historian, when I see people act like Protestant music is inherently "worse" and less interesting than Catholic music. To me, it just makes it really clear that when people mean "Protestant" they really are just talking about "contemporary Christian music," which is funny because a lot of that is specifically evangelical, which many religious scholars view as a separate movement (Reconstructionism) from Protestantism. But regardless, it's a way that people who are culturally Christian who were raised evangelical are showing their own biases.
It's true that because Protestantism tends to value congregational participation in worship more, music tends to be overall less complex because it's designed to be easier for regular people to sing along with or otherwise participate in. However, along with that "complexity" is a cultural moving target and the idea that less "complexity" in a Western classical music sense automatically makes music "worse" is bunk (and disqualifies probably most of the music that people reading this post listen to regularly), this ignores that there's long been a lot of variation in how each Protestant church interprets the role of music. Lutherans and Anglicans, for instance, from fairly early on in their history blended the Catholic approach of hiring professional musicians to play complex music with more congregational participation. And you have the other extreme, like Quakers, who traditionally don't use music in their services at all. A lot of more specific restrictions on music come not from "Protestantism" in general or Martin Luther, but from later people whose ideas are associated with specific branches of Protestantism rather than the whole of it (e.g. John Calvin).
(This also leaves aside that post-Vatican II, Catholic liturgical musical traditions have become a lot more varied. I had a very Catholic friend in high school whose church played contemporary Christian music, including some of the same stuff you'd find in Protestant and evangelical churches. Most Catholic churches in 2025 are not playing full-on Latin masses anymore.)
Anyway, here are some of the musical traditions that fall under "Protestant music" that don't have to do with most of what people consider "Christian rock" or "contemporary Christian music," that I personally think are pretty cool, in a very rough chronological order:
everything religious that J.S. Bach wrote (yes, including the B Minor Mass - masses or portions of them were not unheard-of in Lutheran churches in Bach's time and it was intended as a fusion of Catholic and Lutheran approaches to music);
Felix Mendelssohn's religious music, which makes up a huge chunk of hymns in contemporary hymn books;
Gospel music, spirituals, and most other traditions coming out of the African-American church, which by extension had a major influence on a lot of secular Black popular music (this is such a huge thing that people always leave out of these takes!)
Sacred Harp/Shape Note singing, a style of Protestant congregational singing from the American South (yes, the video is in Ireland, but the style originated in the U.S. during the Second Great Awakening) that has its own form of musical notation
And this is just specifically liturgical music, not even getting to all the popular music out there that references religious themes that is from Protestant musicians, but is not specifically "contemporary Christian" (for instance, Sufjan Stevens, Kendrick Lamar).
This has a PSA from been your friendly neighborhood musicologist! Who is not myself religious, but is not a fan of sweeping incorrect assumptions about music regardless.
