Debates about Christian privilege today often center on whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation. On one side of the argument are writers such as Terry Eastland, David Barton, and also Roy Stewart Moore, the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, who believe that the United States was founded, whether officially or unofficially, as a Christian nation. As Terry Eastland (1984) phrases it in his defense of a specifically Protestant Christian privilege: Let me therefore start with these propositions: that there was a principal religion in American life from 1620 until roughly 1920; that this religion was Protestant Christianity; and that Protestant Christianity has been our established religion in almost every sense of the phrase (p. 50).