Bernard Holland on church music

The NYT music critic has few useful things to say about worship itself, as he's concerned largely with the church's potential role as patron of/inspiration for the arts. Among his variously predictable and bizarre points:

• In the good old days, music was an advertisement for heaven, which is good.
  
• In the bad new days, using "ethnic" music is just an advertisement for diversity, which is bad (the advertisement, not the diversity itself).
  
• The most legitimate argument against high-art church music is that really good music might distract churchgoers from more important things. The same is true of great liturgical poetry--which is why Anglicans are a bunch of godless aesthetes.
  
• The best church music is black gospel, followed by the Verdi requiem.
• High-church music is essentially Catholic, as it emphasizes the distance between the clergy and laity rather than their essential community/unity.

I understand that this is from the arts section, that it's intended to be about composers more than about church itself. But it's just so staggeringly out of touch--for instance, is it possible that Holland is unaware that, back in the real world of actual music happening in actual churches, the overwhelming majority of great classical church music since the Reformation has come out of the Protestant tradition, and the bulk of influential folk/popular liturgical music since Vatican II has come out of the Catholic church?

Whatever--the MSM wouldn't be itself w/o the ocassional cultural piece that is both brazenly elitist and hilariously out of touch, and I spend every Sunday afternoon w/ the NYT I have, not the NYT I wish I had. And if you're interested, you could always check out this church music piece from a very churchy guy writing for the independent press.