Granted. And somewhere in my files I have a quote from Tolkien where he says that he did not intend LOTR as a "Christian" work, but because he is a Christian, that is reflected in his work.
That quote, which is, "I am a Christian and of course what I write will be from that essential viewpoint," is from a letter Tolkien wrote to the American evangelical Clive Kilby, who I mentioned early in the thread. Actually, I have a quote from a letter Tolkien wrote to a Jesuit friend. He said that The Lord of the Rings "is a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision."
Also, in an interview in 1997, close friend of Tolkien, George Sayer, stated that LOTR "would have been very different, and the writing of it very difficult, if Tolkien hadn't been a Christian. He [Tolkien] thought it a profoundly Christian book," and according to Tolkien's son Michael, Roman Catholicism "pervaded all [Tolkien's] thinking, beliefs, and everything else." Birzer's book also mentions that Tolkien was deeply disappointed by the fact that only a few Catholic publications reviewed LOTR when it first came out.