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Originally Posted by Lalaith
Third possible motivation: there are some Christian churches today which limit the reading and knowledge of their members, and seem actively to discourage them from reading or enjoying anything not directly Bible-related. Fantasy literature in particular is regarded with great suspicion, or even banned.
I think that these attempts to "prove" the biblical and Christian provenance of LotR is a way for some people to read and enjoy the work without feeling sinful.
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So we're back to the whole issue of 'meaning' then. LotR has to be shown not only to have a meaning, but a specifically Christian (probably a specifically fundamentalist Evangelical) one. If it cannot be shown to be a Christian allegory, or at least 'orthodox' it must be 'evil', & banned?
As to the point that those Christians are just enjoying the parallels between LotR & the Bible. I don't have any problem with that. I do, however, find that those 'paralllels' are invariably forced & don't really stand up to any scrutiny. It always seems to be a case of 'This episode/character in LotR is like/makes me think of..' (at which point they go off on some tangent & start talking about Isaiah or the Virgin Mary).
Now, I accept that in some of the Letters Tolkien himself had a tendency to do that very thing but perhaps he ought to have had more sense - some of the 'interpretations' he comes up with are so tenuous or so odd that they make your head spin: for example, when he claims that the events at the Sammath Naur are a playing out of the lines in the Lord's Prayer ('Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us') he is definitely pushing it. To try to force that kind of analogy, to try to turn one of the most powerful moments in literature into material for scriptural exegesis (or more likely a very embarrassing sermon) is to treat the story (& the reader) with contempt.
This kind of simple 'one-to-one' analogy never, it seems to me, rises above the confused or embarrassing.