For Joseph, Christianity worked together with folk religion, medicine, and common folklore. Describing early American religion, Jon Butler writes, "As intimate, face-to-face settlements emerged, as the social and religious spectrum of settlements widened, and as increasingly complex religious configurations took shape, magic and occultism also emerged in England's North American colonies and became part of the American experience." The non-institutionalized characteristics of folk religion and the occult was rarely incorporated into genteel religion or declared publically, but those who participated did not firmly distinguish between their own Christian beliefs and the occult. Historian Robert Fuller argues, "Americans have had a persistent interest in religious ideas that fall well outside the parameters of Bible-centered theology...In order to meet their spiritual needs,...[they] switched back and forth between magical and Christian beliefs without any sense of guilt or intellectual inconsistency."