I think that if your intention is to study occultism and mythology, you should major in economics, focusing especially on monetary policy. (Just kidding!)

In truth, many colleges and universities have established departments of religious studies, as opposed to theology or divinity studies. Generally speaking, in the somewhat vaguely defined academic field of religious studies, historians, philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists take religion, religious beliefs, practices, and believers as their objects of study. This is a different sort of academic undertaking than, say, studying religion in preparation for a ministry.

It is also common for colleges and universities to have individual courses on religion in other departments, such as philosophy, literature, classics, history, anthropology, or folklore.

Most academic study of American religious history has focused on the main streams of belief and practice. Because you bring up the issue of getting a job, I will say that this means that academics who might be capable of demonstrating expertise only in what might be regarded as the byways of religion—the occult and all that implies—have found themselves with fewer opportunities to land teaching positions. Developing a broad academic expertise, therefore, in the history of American religion would be a strategy that would maximize a young Ph.D.’s chances of landing a teaching position, no matter what he or she had specialized in.

However, as you might guess, now that the children of the 1960s and 1970s have become the academic old guard, as it were, scholars of American religious history have turned more attention not only to the history in America of the belief and practice of systems that have been explicitly “on the margins,” that is, occultist, but also to the way in which even mainstream religious groups have been influenced by the “alternative spiritualities” that have germinated and taken root here. This would include the Shakers, the Mormons, and the Masons, for example, as well as communal utopians, Swedenborgians, Spiritualists, Theosophists, Christian Scientists, proponents of the “New Thought” movement, and such 20th-century groups as Scientologists and those loosely linked under the name of the “New Age” movement. An example of a recent academic look at American religious history in this vein is Catherine L. Albanese’s 2007 book, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion.

On the material culture of Plymouth Colony, including descriptions of housing, furniture, clothing, and family life and relationships, you could look at John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony, or his, Remarkable Providences: Readings on Early American History. Also good is David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, section on “The Exodus of the English Puritans, 1629-41.”

Easily the most influential book about the New England Puritans' religion has been Perry Miller's 1956, Errand into the Wilderness. More recent and well-regarded books include Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self and David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England.

Online, Professor Donna M. Campbell’s valuable web pages on “Puritanism in New England” may help begin to clarify some of the Puritans’ religious beliefs.

Also online, you can find plenty to read and assign in volumes 1 and 2 of A Library of American Literature, edited by Edmund Stedman and Ellen Hutchinson, and compiled and published in 1887, and which is available via Google Books. The editors included diverse short selections from Puritan writers describing their inner and outer lives and their adventures in settling in America.

A newer anthology of Puritan writings, focusing exclusively on religion (and not available on the web), is The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology, edited by Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco, published in 1985 by Harvard University Press.

Teaching The Scarlet Letter and also reading historical works from and about the Puritans provides an opportunity to emphasize to students that Hawthorne's work was one of historical fiction, written almost two centuries after the events it imagined. Students can easily understand that the book is fiction because the specific people and events its described did not actually exist. They may need some help, however, in understanding that Hawthorne's Puritan world might differ from the real Puritans' world, or in understanding that Hawthorne's fictional enterprise was deeply imbued with mid-19th-century sensibilities and preoccupations. A 17th-century Puritan would never have written a book like it.

Fundamentalism, in the narrowest meaning of the term, was a movement that began in the late 19th- and early 20th-century within American Protestant circles to defend the "fundamentals of belief" against the corrosive effects of liberalism that had grown within the ranks of Protestantism itself. Liberalism, manifested in critical approaches to the Bible that relied on purely natural assumptions, or that framed Christianity as a purely natural or human phenomenon that could be explained scientifically, presented a challenge to traditional belief.

A multi-volume group of essays edited by Reuben Torrey, and published in 1910 under the title, The Fundamentals, was financed and distributed by Presbyterian laymen Lyman and Milton Stewart and was an attempt to arrest the drift of Protestant belief. Its influence was large and was the source of the labeling of conservatives as "fundamentalists."

Useful for looking at this history of fundamentalism are George Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford, 1980), Bruce B. Lawrence, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), David Beale, In Pursuit of Purity: American Fundamentalism Since 1850 (Greenville: Unusual Publications, 1986), and Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992).

Lately, the meaning of the word "fundamentalism" has expanded. This has happened in the press, in academia, and in ordinary language. It appears to be expanding to include any unquestioned adherence to fundamental principles or beliefs, and is often used in a pejorative sense. Nowadays we hear about not only Protestant evangelical fundamentalists, but Catholic fundamentalists, Mormon fundamentalists, Islamic fundamentalists, Hindu fundamentalists, Buddhist fundamentalists, and even atheist or secular or Darwinian fundamentalists.

Scholars of religion have perhaps indirectly contributed to this expansion of the term, as they have tried to look for similarities in ways of being religious that are common in various systems of belief. Between 1991 and 1995, religion scholars Martin Marty and Scott Appleby published a 5-volume collection of essays as part of "The Fundamentalism Project" at the University of Chicago, which is an example of this approach. Appleby is co-author of Strong Religion (2003), also from the University of Chicago Press that attempts to give a common explanatory framework for understanding anti-modern and anti-secular religious movements around the world.

At least some Baptists do not consider themselves "Protestants." This is to emphasize their sense that, insofar as the Protestant Reformation was as a contest between the Roman Catholic Church and reformers who sought to protest certain features of the Catholic Church and to reestablish the Church on what they considered was a purer basis, the Baptists have not entered into that contest. They have rejected the notion of a "universal Church" altogether, admitting the authority of only local organizations, individual communities of believers, and, ultimately, each individual before God. As a result, they have found themselves at odds with the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, and mainline denominational Protestantism.

The entire Reformation, however, trended in this direction—away from recognizing a central authority and toward recognizing "private judgment" as the touchstone of authority. In this light, therefore, Baptists are heirs of the Protestant Reformation, and their reluctance to group themselves with other Protestants is a radical form of the spiritual individualism that characterized the Reformation as a whole.

The Baptists, specifically, grew within and from, the Separatist movement in England during its civil war in the 16th century. The Separatists wished to separate from the established Church of England and form independent congregations. They were also called "Nonconformists" because they did not conform in doctrine or practice with the established Church. Most of them were Puritans—that is Congregationalists—and the Pilgrims brought Puritanism to America and established it in New England.

Some of the Separatists also adopted an extreme skepticism regarding civil control over religion. They formed congregations that had essentially no authority over one another in matters of doctrine or practice, and they also admitted no overarching religious authority. Some of them were influenced by the teachings of the earlier "Anabaptists" in northern Europe. Although the Anabaptists adopted Calvinist theology, they had some unique views that the early Baptists adopted.

The most characteristic of these was the conviction that Church membership was open only to believers who had consciously made a commitment of faith in Jesus Christ. This meant that children and infants, who were incapable of a mature commitment, could not be baptized. Their rejection of infant baptism became one of the most pronounced differences between them and the practices of other Christians, both Catholic and Protestant. Converts who had been baptized previously, therefore, were baptized again (ana-baptist), or, from the perspective of the (so-called) Anabaptists, were truly baptized for the first time. All these groups were convinced that this was the only form of baptism practiced by the first Christians. The Baptists adopted these views, as well as the idea that Baptism could only be accomplished by complete immersion in water, rather than by pouring water over the head.

In England, the early Baptists were persecuted. John Bunyan, the Baptist author of The Pilgrim's Progress, for example, wrote his book while imprisoned for his unauthorized preaching.

In England and then in America, Baptists were first drawn from the ranks of Congregationalists whose beliefs had modified to align with Baptist beliefs. In New England and elsewhere in America, Baptists were persecuted during the 17th century.

Roger Williams, who had been persecuted for his anti-establishment sermons in Massachusetts, exiled himself out of reach of his Puritan opponents and established the colony of Rhode Island. He helped found what was probably the first Baptist Church in America in Providence in 1638.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, Baptists found the religious freedom they sought, at the beginning in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, but then elsewhere. Their ranks were enlarged by converts from Congregationalism, but also from other Nonconformist sects. In addition, they embraced the movement of religious revival during the Second Great Awakening, and found an enthusiastic mass of converts as they spread down the Appalachians into the South and West. Baptists played a crucial role in influencing the framers of the Constitution to insure freedom of religion and conscience in the new Republic, and to promote the idea of a "wall of separation" between church and state.

The highly autonomous nature of a Baptist congregation, recognizing no higher "worldly" authority over the religious beliefs and practices of its members, proved to be a good fit in many ways with the democratic, populist character of America. It also appealed to African Americans, who could found their own churches with little religious interference from others.

The United States Constitution does not state in so many words that there is a separation of church and state. The first part of the First Amendment to the Constitution states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Therefore, it is more accurate to say that the Constitution promotes freedom of religion and prohibits the federal government from inhibiting its citizens’ ability to worship as they wish.

There were some colonial predecessors to this concept. For example, when Roger Williams was banned from Massachusetts Bay for his religious beliefs in 1636, he founded the colony of Rhode Island on the premise that persons of all religions were welcome. In 1649 Lord Baltimore drafted the Maryland Toleration Act, which protected Maryland colonists’ rights to worship as they pleased, and William Penn’s colony of Pennsylvania, founded in 1681, also welcomed persons of diverse religions, although only Anglicans and Quakers could hold political office. The expression “separation of church and state” can be traced to an 1802 letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to a group of men affiliated with the Danbury Baptists Association of Connecticut. In this letter he stated that religion was “a matter which lies solely between Man & his God,” and that government should not have any influence over opinions. Therefore, he asserted: “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.” Jefferson was a member of the Church of England throughout his life. However, while a student at William and Mary, Jefferson became a follower of Deism, an enlightenment-era religion based on reason and observation of the natural world that grew out of the Enlightenment. Deists rejected the idea of supernatural occurrences, such as miracles, and they believed that God created the universe, but did not interfere in its workings. Jefferson introduced the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom in 1779, which became law in 1786. It separated Virginia government from any established church and asserted that the religious opinions of men were not the business of the government.