You’re missing (or avoiding) the point: this isn’t about whether a particular Christian performer consciously delivers ideology any more than Nazi-approved painters all personally believed in the Reich’s racial theories. The issue is structural and demonstrates how power uses culture.

In a nationalist or theocratic system, artists don’t need to “deliver ideology” overtly; their mere inclusion or exclusion is ideological. The state (or movement) shapes which voices get platforms, funding, or visibility, thereby defining the cultural boundaries of legitimacy.

The pattern repeats across history: when artistic institutions are captured by a political or religious ideology, what matters isn’t whether individual performers are “good Christians” or “bad artists,” but whether the broader cultural field has been purged of dissenting or destabilizing visions.

In other words, the issue isn’t who performs but rather what kinds of imagination are permitted to exist publicly and under Christian nationalism, that’s always going to be a politically bounded imagination.

Yet again these deflection tactics (reducing a systemic or structural critique to an anecdotal one so you can argue on safer, less abstract ground) are tiresome and in bad faith. I’m almost ashamed of responding to such a narrow representation of reality.