On specific issues of the American Revolution and whether rebellion was justified:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/kolkey3.1.1.html

A perspective on a wider framework of Catholic moral reasoning on revolution using St. Thomas Aquinas:
http://romanchristendom.blogspot.com/
(You may have to scroll down a bit if the blog administrator has posted something on a different topic since the time of my reply here).

But for another perspective, I am currently reading a Pulitzer-Prize winning book by Bernard Bailyn called “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.” It’s a good read.

So arbitrarily imposing taxes upon a continent without their permission is not tyranny? It may have been light compared to the despotisms of the modern age, or those in Catholic Spain and France at that time, but that is no reason to believe their rebellion unjustified.

However, once independence was attained, one has to admire George Washington for his leadership qualities and his awareness of the need for the social “common denominator” of the Judeo-Christian tradition, even though evidence of his own beliefs as distinctively Christian seems scant. Even King George III of Great Britain, who was a devout Christian, acknowledged Washington’s high caliber of character in not seizing power for himself after the war.

I believe that the reputation of the founders as deists who were skeptical of historic, creedal Christianity does derive from the fact that a number of the most influential “top-tier” founders did not adhere to core Christian distinctives. “Deistic Anglican” seems an appropriate label for George Washington. Though raised in the Calvinist tradition and having a view of human nature more in line with Christianity, John Adams, toward the end of life, seems (like much of New England) to have moved in a Unitarian direction and relegated the question of Christ’s divinity to a matter of practical non-importance. The evidence of which I am aware indicates that Benjamin Franklin and James Madison were deists, although the latter’s view of human nature seems more influenced by Christianity. Certainly, with Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, modern day secularists find their greatest kindred spirits among the founders. Alexander Hamilton, though I believe always a professing Christian, seems to have become more devout after his presidential ambitions had been thwarted, and he founded the “Christian Constitutional Society” in New York.

However, as Thomas Jefferson’s stature as the American prophet of the Enlightenment looms large on historical and rhetorical landscape, one could view him as the founder most influential in nurturing the seed that would develop into the secularism of today. To a seemingly greater degree than his deistic compatriots, he denigrated traditional Christian metaphysics in private letters, condemning in harsh terms such men as the Gospel writers, St. Paul, and St. Athanasius for corrupting the “simple” teachings of Jesus. To quote one statement from the Jefferson Memorial, the “forms of tyranny over the mind of man,” to which he vowed “eternal hostility” on “the altar of God” would have included, for him, the “priestcraft” of the Catholic Church and to whatever degree Protestant Christianity retained its legacies. In founding of the University of Virginia in his twilight years, Jefferson was leveraging the power of the state to create a secular educational institution that was intended to lessen the influence of historic Christianity over subsequent generations of his countrymen. Of course, this did not quite happen to the degree he hoped in the immediately succeeding generations.

Jefferson could relegate differences within the Judeo-Christian tradition to the private realm (sort of like a hobby some people enjoy), because the culture of his day was still undergirded by the common denominator of that tradition’s belief system about the source of human dignity. Though not prepared to dispense with belief in a benevolent Creator, he wrongly believed that America could dispense with distinctives of Judeo-Christian metaphysics, but yet somehow retain the virtues produced by that tradition, whether in family life or civic life. Two hundred years later, we’re witnessing the shortcomings produced by that intellectual legacy.