Since Christians often just read "Christian Tolkien" literature they often don't know this is a subcultural position that is deeply critiqued. I noticed a helpful paper from 1988, Catherine Madsen's “Light from an Invisible Lamp: Natural Religion in The Lord of the Rings,”

https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol14/iss3/9/

Tolkien's fantasies have no religion, she notes, and Christians looking for it "have mined it for Christian contents with the same ingenuity their spiritual forebears used to find foreshadowings of Jesus among the law and prophets."

I realized she was right: Christian "exegetical" methods of reading the Bible were transferred to Tolkien. (The same is true, incidentally, of Q-Anon.) Christian academics could study Tolkien and pretend they were scholars staying in the domain of Christianity. So it all worked well, so long as critiques weren't acknowledged. A mass hallucination.

There are Christian echoes in Tolkien, and Madsen has a nice take on that: "If lembas, the Elves' waybread, clearly recalls the sacramental wafer as Frodo and Sam subsist on it in Mordor, it is the idea of spiritual food that comes through, shorn of all suggestion or argument of Christ's presence in it. Tolkien borrows Christian magic, not Christian doctrine; and Christianity without doctrine is a shadow of itself."

So Tolkien takes Christian concepts and feelings, removes the deity and gives you just the feelz. A comfortable sensation without the angry God looking to torture you.

She adds: "If, for whatever purpose of his own, he images a world without Christianity, he makes that world imaginable to his readers; he may even make it worth longing for."

Yes, I thought. Reading Tolkien, Christians get to luxuriate in religious escapism—escaping their religion—while remaining within it.