With English literature, if you do a bit of shonky spelling, no one dies, but if you're half-way through a maths calculation and you stick in an extra zero, everything just crashes into the ravine.
For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete.
I'm kind of a reluctant Anglophile. My mother's a children's librarian, and all of the children's literature I read was from her childhood - E. Nesbit and Dickens, which isn't children's literature at all, but I was sort of steeped in English literature. I thought I was of that world.
At graduation, I assumed I'd be in publishing, but first I went to England and got a master's degree in English Literature. And then I came back to New York and had a series of publishing jobs, the way one does.
I studied English literature; I took 2 independent religion classes, but I wasn't a religion major really.