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Notes -
It's akin to the restrictions created by Christianity: to some degree, they can make for a better story, but not when they become too tight. So C. S. Lewis could, operating within a fairly but not entirely stuffy kind of Christian ethos and worldview, produce great children's stories that appeal even to the unconverted, but hardcore fundamentalists are infamously bad story tellers.
This trend goes back about as far as human culture: Aristophanes was conservative in contrast to Socrates and Plato, but not entirely pious. He wouldn't mock Zeus, but he did mock Dionysus. Constraints, to some degree, are good for creativity - that's one of the secrets of good poetry - provided those constraints stay within constraints. Even great conservative films like Ben Hur or The Dark Knight have a pinch of deviancy in them, perhaps because it's hard for profoundly creative people to stay within orthodoxy in all respects. Also, even great children's stories make one think, and the compatibility of orthodoxy (whether conservative or progressive) with thinking is a matter of degree.
I think there’s a lot to that. Makes me think of Brandon Sanderson. The Mormonism gives him somewhere to stand and serious (now also vaguely countercultural) principles to conjure with, but aren’t so restrictive that they force him to be dour and po-faced.
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