The Tolkiens, Congregationalism and Númenóreans

J. R. R. Tolkien in his letter from 1951 to Florence Tolkien (see here) wrote about his grandfather, John Benjamin Tolkien ("III"):

He was once a wealthy man, but not one of business and a rigidly religious Baptist and would not deal with music halls or theatres. He was a dear old and poor man in the nineties when I knew him.

From my previous research I know that the Tolkien family in Birmingham were Pedobaptists (they baptized children) from the Congregational chapels called Ebenezer Chapel (at Steelhouse Lane; it was a worship place of the Stowe family, J. B. Tolkien's third wife, Mary Jane Stowe was baptized there in 1833) and Union Chapel (five minutes walk from John Benjamin Tolkien's house in Handsworth). This denomination evolved from the Proto-Methodist Connexion of Lady Huntingdon to which John Benjamin Tolkien I (J. R. R. Tolkien's great-great-grandfather) belonged after he left Gdańsk (Danzig) and arrived in London in c. 1770. 

Some John Benjamin Tolkien's children with Mary Jane Stowe had second names being the same as the family names of the Congregational ministers (see here):

Grace Bindley Tolkien was named after Rev. R. Bindley from Birmingham
Frank Winslow Tolkien after Rev. Octavius Winslow from Leamington
Lawrence George Hammond Tolkien after Rev. John Hammond

The last uncle of J. R. R. Tolkien was very important for his education. Lawrance Tolkien (a resident secretary to the Colonial Mutual Life Assurance Society living in Moseley) was regularly paying for young Tolkien's school.

So the original Christian denomination of the paternal family of J. R. R. Tolkien's father, Arthur Reuel Tolkien is already known. Professor Tolkien called it "Baptist" but it was in fact a part of the 'Baptist' tradition which was connected with Congregational chapels in and near Birmingham.

It is interesting that the religion of Gondor and Arnor in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings was more like Puritan and Congregationalist religion of J. R. R. Tolkien's ancestors than his Roman Catholicism. See the fragment from a letter of J. R. R. Tolkien do Rhona Beare about the resemblance of the Númenóreans to Egyptians, Puritans and Hebrews.

«The Númenóreans of Gondor were proud, peculiar, and archaic, and I think are best pictured in (say) Egyptian terms. In many ways they resembled 'Egyptians' – the love of, and power to construct, the gigantic and massive. And in their great interest in ancestry and in tombs. (But not of course in 'theology' : in which respect they were Hebraic and even more puritan – but this would take long to set out: to explain indeed why there is practically no overt 'religion', or rather religious acts or places or ceremonies among the 'good' or anti-Sauron peoples in The Lord of the Rings.)»