Although the age of the Valar, higher angels or greater gods depending on whether one likes a Christian or a Norse pagan aesthetic, was largely ended in Middle Earth with the First Age, that Age clearly ended with the direct intervention not only of the Valar but of Iluvatar. There were elves, at least, in the Third Age who had been alive at the end of the First Age and knew of these events first-hand. That is substantially more tangible evidence of divine powers and much more evidence of their active intervention than we in this dimension have ever had for our religions.

The Second and Third Age certainly were dominated day to day by lesser beings. Even so, I thought it still mainstream to take Sauron and all of the Istari as Maiar. All of whom played driving roles in history, obvious to all observers. Indispensable players. There were elves with Maiar blood in them, and I think that also extended to the Men of the Half-Elven including the line of the Kings. In other words, a subset of a divinely touched race with magical powers who had in addition divine blood and greater powers, and a spin off line of humans with divine blood [a notion Greeks and Norse recognized] and for whom the Divine Right of Kings was a biological reality.

This was a world in which religion, narrowly understood as the presence of hierarchy/institution, dogma and ritual, may have been absent. But religion, understood traditionally as the set of beliefs about the cosmos, the world, and life, and the narrative surrounding these things, was not absent. It was omnipresent and verifiable by witnesses.

Were our world like that, perhaps we would not have any organized clerical traditions either, certainly not so many. If the verifiable tradition were the Christian story, even Christianity might not have a “Church” as such.

I think the question is therefore not the [to me extraordinarily simpleminded] one of whether or not there is a priestly caste preaching doctrine in a building, as , “Is this is a what a world would look like whose cosmology was physically visible among them every day?”

The Buddhist approach would seem a more fruitful line- its traditions have offered both a variety of scaled divine beings of their own, and accommodated those Buddhism found in each country it touched. Although the moral and spiritual message in Tolkien may not be Buddhist, these elements of his structure could be compared to Buddhism. But, then, that too would make it a world “with” religion, not without it.