iv just been wondering? so was he a Christian? i re-sorse i found said he was but it might be prove wrong but here it is

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Was Tolkien a Christian?

The answer is an obvious and unequivocal YES, he was. Yet as with most dealings with Tolkien there are many levels at work here. Some can be seen directly from his Letters. Some are detailed in his authorized biography by H. Carpenter. Others I have gleaned from a critical work called "Splintered Light" by V. Flieger, which in my opinion is THE best examination of how Tolkien's religious beliefs influenced the genesis (ha, no pun intended) of his myths.

This article does not attempt to detail how these beliefs manifested themselves in his work, rather it is more of a catalog of Letters and cited references from his biography and critical works which demonstrate that Tolkien was a very religious person, a devout Christian, and that this played a major role in the synthesis of his writings.

To begin with, his biography states that at the time of his birth in South Africa, his mother and father both were of the Anglican Church of England. Due to concerns for JRRT's health, mother and children traveled back to Birmingham England. His father remained in South Africa to tend to his business. Soon after, his father caught rhuematic fever and died:
"Christianity had played an increasingly important part in Mabel Tolkien's life since her husband's death, and each Sunday she had taken the boys on a long walk to a `high' Anglican church. Then one Sunday Ronald (JRRT) and Hilary (his brother) found that they were going by strange roads to a different place of worship: St Anne's, Alcester Street, in the slums near the centre of Birmingham. It was a Roman Catholic church. Mabel had been thinking for some time about becoming a Catholic....Immediately the wrath of her family fell upon them...That his daughter should turn papist was to him an outrage beyond belief...The strain that this induced, coupled with the additional hardship, did no good to her health; but nothing would shake her loyalty to her new faith, and agains all opposition she bean to instruct Ronald ahd Hilary in the Catholic religion."
[Tolkien Biography pgs 24-25]

Here we glimpse a situation where his mother's choice of religious belief (changing from Anglican to Catholicism), which provided her much needed spiritual support was actually detrimental to her physical well being because of the stress put on her from her non-Catholic family. Her condition worsened with time and the outcome not unforeseen:
"Unnoticed by her sons, Mabel's condition began to deteriorate again. At the beginning of November she collapsed in a way that seemed to them sudden and terrifying. She sank into a diabetic coma, and six days later, on 14 November, with Father Francis and her sister May Incledon at her bedside in the cottage, she died."
[Tolkien Biography pg 30]

What follows is a lengthy excerpt from the critical analysis by V. Flieger called "Splintered Light" which most astutely states that Tolkien's religion was on one hand a solace for his loss, but was also somewhat responsible for his mother's death - and so created a paradox in Tolkien's character that manifested itself in his writings:
"Mabel Tolkien's conversion to Catholicism when Tolkien was eight years old permanently estranged her from her relatives. Her determination to bring up her children - Tolkien and his younger brother Hilary - in the Catholic faith cut her off from the emotional and financial support of her family. Tolkien came to feel that his mother's heroic efforts to raise and educate her sons alone had drained her strength, and were the direct cause of her death. When she died he was bereft. `The loss of his mother,' says Carpenter, `had a profound effect on his personality. It made him into a pessimist. Or rather, it made him into two people.' Carpenter goes on to characterize Tolkien's two sides: `He was by nature a cheerful almost irrepressible person with a great zest for life...But from now onwards there was to be a second side, more private but predominant in his diaries and letters. This side of him was capable of bouts of profound despair. More precisely, and more closely related to his mother's death, when he was in this mood he had a deep sense of impending loss. Nothing was safe. Nothing would last. No battle would be won forever. (TAB p. 31)'

His solace was his religion. But these feelings colored his religious outlook and gave it the same mixture of light and dark.

`My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith.' Tolkien's description of his mother's sacrifice as an "easy" way to God is hard to fathom, for it is clear that the shock of his mother's death affected him deeply. An yet the statement is evidence of the close, emotional association which he always made between his mother and his faith. This is more than polarity; it is paradox. His Catholicism was inextricably linked with his mother, but her adherence to that religion had, in his view, led to her death and thus to his bereavement. The very thing which gave him his faith robbed him of his mother, and thus mixed with that faith a sense of irretrievable loss."
[Splintered Light p.2-3]

How does this internal struggle and paradox make itself part of his writings? Well, I will make one more citation from Splintered Light which sums this up best:
"This alternation between the vision of hope and the knowledge of despair - between light and dark - is both the essence of Tolkien and the clearest characteristic of his work. The contrast and interplay of light and dark are essential elements of his fiction. The light/dark polarity operates on all levels - literal, metaphoric, symbolic. It engenders Creation and Fall; it becomes language; and its interplay becomes the interplay of good and evil, belief and doubt, free will and fate."
[Splintered Light p. 4]

I hope that those of you who have laboured so far through this commentary will realize that Tolkien's religion played a most important part of his life and his works. But as you have seen, it was a most complicated situation - a source of joy and sadness at the same time.

Ok, enough of the commentary - what follows are specific excerpts direct from Tolkien's Letters where he explicity states his religious beliefs. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From Letter #131:
...Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its `faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion.
For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary `real' world. (I am speaking, of course. of our present situation, not of ancient pagan, pre-Christian days.)... In the cosmogony there is a fall: a fall of Angels we should say. Though quite different in form, of course, to that of Christian myth. These tales are `new', they are not directly derived from other myths and legends, but they must inevitably contain a large measure of ancient wide-spread motives or elements. After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of `truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.

From Letter #142:
The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like `religion', to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.

From Letter #165:
It is not `about' anything but itself. Certainly it has no allegorical intentions, general, particular, or topical, moral, religious, or political. The only criticism that annoyed me was on that it `contained no religion' (and `no Women', but that does not matter, and is not true anyway). It is a monotheistic world of `natural theology'. The odd fact that there are no churches, temples, or religious rits and ceremonies, is simply part of the historical climate depicted. It will be sufficiently explained, if (as now seems likely) the Silmarillion and other legends of the First and Second Ages are published. I am in any case myself a Christian; but the `Third Age' was not a Christian world.

From Letter #195:
Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect `history' to be anything but a `long defeat' - though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.

From Letter #213:
...I object to the contemporary trend in criticism, with its excessive interest in the details of the lives of authors and artists. They only distract attention from an author's works (if the works are in fact worthy of attention). and end, as one now often sees, in becoming the main interest. But only one's guardian Angel, or indeed God Himself, could unravel the real relationship between personal facts and an author's works. Not the author himself (though he knows more than any investigator), and certainly not so-called `psychologists'. ...I was born in 1892 and lived for my early years in `the Shire' in a pre-mechanical age. Or more important, I am a Christian (which can be deduced from my stories), and in fact a Roman Catholic. The latter `fact' perhpas cannot be deduced; thou one critic (by letter) asserted that the invocations of Elbereth, and the character of Galadriel as directly described (or through the words of Gimli and Sam) were clearly related to Catholic devotion to Mary. Another saw in waybread (lembas)=viaticum and the reference to its feeding the will (vol. III, p. 213) and being more potent when fasting, a derivation from the Eucharist. (That is: far greater things may colour the mind in dealing with the lesser things of a fair-story.)

From Letter #269:
With regard to The Lord of the Rings, I cannot claim to be a sufficient theologian to say whether my notion of orcs is heretical or not. I don't fell under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief, which is asserted elsewhere.

From Letter #310:
...So it may be said that the chief purpose of life, for any one of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks. To do as we say in the Gloria in Excelsis:...We praise you, we call you holy, we worship you, we proclaim your glory, we thank you for the greatness of your splendour.

From Letter #320:
...I think it is true that I owe much of (the character of Galadriel) to Christian and Catholic teaching and imagination about Mary....

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its quite long but it says a lot.

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I object to the contemporary trend in criticism, with its excessive interest in the details of the lives of authors and artists. They only distract attention from an author's works and end, as one now often sees, in becoming the main interest.

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Good point, Professor!