Religious fundamentalism and the Constitution

My friend, Leah the Lawyer, posed an interesting question with regard to the religion, the threat we currently face, and how the Founding Fathers (FF) might have faced the question. Here's a bit of what she wrote...

"I was wondering the other day, as I drove around, what would Thomas Jefferson think about the War on Terror. What would our Founding Fathers think, if they were presented with the knowledge that religious fundamentalists who had no qualms about sending themselves, their wives, or even their children, into battle armed to a T in order implement a suicide bombing."

I revisited my plan for this post Friday night. I was flipping through my Thomas Jefferson reader while I was kicking it at work and I re-read his first inaugural speech. I came across a quote that sort of summed it up for me. He said

"In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."

I think that's the crap shoot right there. That's the whole ballgame...we are asked every day to put aside the process (the Constitutional processes) and trust President Bush. Stop asking questions about Gonzalez, trust me. Stop asking questions about how I manage the war prisons, trust me. I think that TJ would be more alarmed about the manner in which we have decided to prosecute this war than the threat itself. I say this because I believe that the FF's and their contemporaries were living through a time of extreme religious intolerance and violence. The Age of Reason saw the end (essentially) of the modernization of Christianity. Even at the time of the constitutional convention there were instances of religious extremism in America--it was one of the factors that brought about the end of the Articles of Confederation. Ultimately, I believe that TJ would see the war on terror as a more potent threat to our survival than the threat of radical islam.

On a tangential note, is there a policy difference in thinking of radical islam as a strategic threat as opposed to a threat to our way of life? i mean...can we think of radical islam as a threat to the lives of people rather than a wholesale assault on the idea of america? i know that the radicals want to destroy us--not just our lives and property (well, maybe they'll keep our property) but also our ideas. but, have they? i mean have they even come close to hurting our ideas? just a thought or two...i'll expand in a later post, i think.