Christianity Today Op-Ed:  Were Christian Colonists Justified in Fighting in the Revolutionary War?, by  Mark A. Noll (Regent; Author, Christians in the American Revolution):

Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.
Rom. 13:1 (NIV)

Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human authority: whether to the emperor, as the supreme authority,  or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right.
1 Peter 2:13-14 (NIV)

Only one population in the colonies clearly was justified by classical Christian reasoning in taking up arms to defend itself—the half-million or so enslaved African Americans who were held in bondage as the result of armed attacks upon peaceful noncombatants.

When it comes to the British actions toward the colonies in the decade before 1776, almost all historians concede those actions were insensitive, based on lamentable misconceptions of colonial life, and often simply stupid. … [C]olonial leaders complaining about mistreatment from Britain were not making things up.

But were the admitted abuses serious enough to warrant an armed revolution? Patriot leaders thought so, but there is a problem with why they thought so. They were troubled less by actual evils. … Rather, they interpreted the bumbling British actions as a conspiracy to exterminate liberty in the colonies. …

To the extent that colonists really thought that Britain intended systematic despotism, their going to war could perhaps be justified in classical Christian terms. Armed action to preempt an enemy’s destructive intentions had long been considered moral. But if the problem in Britain was not primarily a malicious conspiracy but insensitive bungling, war would not have been justified. …

[P]rinciples of just war going back to Augustine insisted that war was justified only as a last resort after all reasonable means of ending disputes peacefully had been exhausted. … 

[T]he Bible was used as a reservoir of images, moral principles, and types. Many sermons in America (and some in Britain) supported revolt, while a few in America and England argued against it. Serious exegesis, however, of what would seem to us like the relevant passages (such as Romans 13) was very rare. …

Americans fought a war to gain the kind of freedom that Canada, New Zealand, and Australia were simply given after not too many decades. An evil precedent was also established in America for later times of national crisis by employing the Bible eccentrically (instead of theologically) and by worrying about classical Christian justifications for warfare hardly at all. The lesson here is not that America had a uniquely evil history, for the Founding Fathers were morally exemplary on many other matters. It is that using the Scriptures for public disputes requires a full measure of reasoned calm as well as passionate engagement.

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