Tolkien's Faith | An Interview with Paul E. Kerry

Tolkien's Faith | An Interview with Paul E. Kerry, editor of The Ring and the Cross: Christianity and The Lord of the Rings | by Sean McGuire | Ignatius Insight | May 23, 2011

Dr. Paul E. Kerry is an associate professor of history at Brigham Young University, research associate at Corpus Christi College and visiting fellow at the Woolf Institute, Cambridge. He specializes in German, Jewish and intellectual history. J.R.R. Tolkien is the latest of several scholarly subjects into which he has plunged. Past works include Thomas Carlyle Resartus: Reappraising Carlyle's Contribution to the Philosophy of History, Political Theory, and Cultural Criticism and Friedrich Schiller: Playwright, Poet, Philosopher, Historian.

He is the editor of the recently published collection, The Ring and the Cross: Christianity and The Lord of the Rings (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010), which includes essays by Joseph Pearce, Bradley J. Birzer, John Holmes, and several other Tolkien experts. Dr. Kerry is also co-editor, with Sandra Miesel, of the book, Light Beyond All Shadow: Religious Experience in the Work of J. R. R. Tolkien (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, August 2011). He recently spoke with Sean McGuire (who blogs at The Room of Shattered Glass) about The Ring and the Cross, Tolkien's faith, and the great popularity of The Lord of the Rings.

McGuire: In your Introduction, you mention a lot of questions scholars have covered in the "Is-Tolkien-A-Christian" debate. How did you frame this debate and why?

Kerry: Well, I would first point out that the question is not "Is Tolkien a Christian" – the overwhelming majority of scholars understand that Tolkien was a devout Catholic who believed in the truth, beauty, majesty, and salvific power of the Roman Catholic Church. The question is to what extend did Catholicism inform his fictional writings, particularly The Lord of the Rings, his masterpiece.

As a student at Oxford I was a member of the C.S. Lewis Society that drew many Christians of varying denominations together, as well as those who simply enjoyed his writings. The thought was a glimmer at the time, but I wondered about Tolkien's writings and their relation to Christianity. In the case of Lewis it is more obvious and thus less contested. Sometimes that leads to complacency and Lewis's fiction is relegated to Christian allegory, and we do not see his formidable mind and skills as a writer as clearly as we should.

My long-time colleague Dr Michael Ward, an Anglican clergyman, wrote Planet Narnia (Oxford, 2008) that has been justly praised as an interpretative breakthrough in Lewis scholarship on precisely this point. Michael, in fact, was president of the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society when I was a member and we remained in touch when I was a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge when he was a chaplain at St. Peter's College. In fact, I helped him set up a speaking engagement at Princeton University and I recall when we conversed thinking that I would like The Ring and Cross and Light Beyond All Shadow to reflect the same judicious scholarship that he had employed in Planet Narnia.

I wanted to provide a forum where scholars interested in the subject could articulate their ideas and present them with civility. I think that the exchange in the book between Professors Hutton and Agøy illustrates precisely this.

McGuire: Is it the case that most Americans are too religiously illiterate to understand Tolkien?

Read the entire interview on Ignatius Insight...