I think fantasy is not really bound to any religion so much as it is bound to a particular way of looking at the world. Somehow the faeries from the old English countryside infected the intellectualism of Oxford’s finest minds. Somehow the old magic of Merlin survived Christianity and became part of the mythical world-building of Tolkien and Lewis and the many non-religious fantasy authors who followed them.

Alyssa Rosenberg complicates this thought: