In a Christianity Today article posted back in February 1999, Mark Noll responded to the following question:

“Considering the biblical injunction to submit to civil government (Rom. 13:1 and 1 Peter 2:13-14), were Christian colonists justified in participating in the Revolutionary War?”

Noll tips his hand from the beginning when he writes:

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.

He clarifies his sentiments later:

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.

His conclusion? Here it is:

As a result, 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.

What are your thoughts?