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...is the banning of fantasy genre books an attempt to shut a Pandora's Box that Tolkien himself opened?
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You might say rather that Tolkien (as well as other scholars)
reopened a box that had been firmly shut, nailed down and buried long ago.
Through the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, Judeo-Christian and Islamic culture sought to stamp out and irradicate all memories of the religious beliefs, or "mythologies" of other cultures. If they could not irradicate it, then they assimilated it, (as in the appropriating of certain Pagan holy days, renaming them as "Saint Days").
Admiration for ancient Greco-Roman culture led to the preservation of their mythologies, but otherwise our ancestors did a pretty good job of wiping the slate clean.
It's rather ironic that Tolkien would lament the loss of an "English mythology", when the very religion that he practices fought so hard to erase it.
I suppose an argument could be made by Fundamentalist clerics that though Tolkien does write from the perspective of a Christian, and has given Middle-earth a relatively monotheist deity, he did not give the Elves, Dwarfs and Ents the "One God". So he could be accused of creating a "false god".
Oh, and his suggestion that other races besides Men lived at one time smacks of the heresy of the theory of Evolution to me! And let's not even go into the suggestion that certain animals in M-E may have actually have had "souls".
I'm quite sure if you were able to ask a long line of Christian scholars, bishops, popes and kings "what should we do about Tolkien?", they would happily cry "burn him!" (Not just the books, but the good author himself.) [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]