The Parallax of Healing: Musical Technique as Fantasy’s Hardware in Contemporary Christian Worship

This article develops an interpretive method for reading worship music as the material infrastructure of ideological fantasy rather than a neutral vehicle for theological meaning. Through a parallax analysis of the Cantonese worship conference Raw Harmony Worship Live (Hong Kong, 2026), this study demonstrates how a radically consistent "Wall of Sound" generates non-overlapping economies of enjoyment depending on the orchestration of the subject's fantasy space. The parallax gap thus disclosed reveals the libidinal infrastructure of contemporary therapeutic religion, where the same technical hardware functions alternately as ecstatic fullness and a contemplative void. Both assemblages perform a similar structural operation by translating socio-economic trauma into manageable interiority, a process that forecloses political questions by converting structural conditions into therapeutic occasions. The article concludes by asking whether worship music might traverse rather than merely service the fantasy, offering a methodology that repositioned musical arrangements as ideology's hardware rather than its decorative surface.