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Bęthberry, reading your post was the first time I ever cognated Minas Morgul as hell. Are you certain that it's Tolkien allegorizing and not you? Is there somewhere in Tolkien's Letters that he refers to Minas Morgul or Mordor as his depiction of hell? The only adjective Tolkien uses for the vale of Minas Morgul in the Letters, that I could find, was "dreadful". I'll give you that MM is hellish, but that's as far as I can go.
I admit that I cannot come at this from the same space as some of you (I almost said "objectivity" instead of "space", but who are we kidding? None of us are really objective about this topic), because I was born in, raised in, and still practice, the same faith as Tolkien; so some things are apparently "home" to me that are alien to other readers.
That said, I find it interesting that you admitted that Tolkien's vision of Minas Morgul seemed to have come from his experience in WW1; in my recent reading of the chapter, I had the same thought. So did you cognate Minas Morgul as hell in your very first reading, Bęthberry? Did others of you? If you did, then this section did function for you as a disenchanting emblem of religion. I suspect that Tolkien had no such intention, but wrote this out of who he was just as much as every other part of LotR. A writer with integrity cannot be blamed for that which his readers bring to his work. Not that I think anybody's accusing Tolkien of lack of integrity; I'm just trying to point some things out; with limited success, I'm sure.
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