As regards Tolkien, I have a very different understanding of the facts.
His church attendance seems to have been spotty (source: Raymond Edwards’ “Tolkien”). By his own admission Tolkien was all but apostate for the decade in which he was composing his Middle-earth mythology. (But according to Clyde Kilby he would also suggest he'd known the mythology in utero.)
Tolkien is not “devout.” Religiously, he was an agnostic who was socially Catholic. He seems to have believed in reincarnation and denied that church officials could have any knowledge about such matters. He attended church, he wrote in a letter, to be sympathetically present with fellow churchgoers who were suffering.
I'm unsure how you could get "authentically heterosexual" from any part of his life. He is reported having a single romantic interest in his entire life—a love conceived when he was 15 and seriously depressed. She was Anglican and a forced conversion resulted in years of domestic warfare.
Tolkien would say that Edith had refused "to continue her education or improve her mind." They slept in separate bedrooms and kept separate schedules, he preferring much later hours. They led largely separate lives, in that he was often working, with his academic friends, or writing—none of which involved her.
The impression of existing biography, as a scholar notes, is that the "Tolkiens were a couple who were never meant to be together, and that Tolkien himself was a man who knew very little about marriage…"
But little is known, in the end. Tolkien's personal letters to his wife are unpublished, as is his diary, and nearly nothing is known of Edith's perspective. Tolkien’s children contrived a biography that he himself had refused to participate in, and they keep the key sources hidden.
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