The Architecture of Enmity: Stop Designing the War You Say You Fear

The Architecture of Enmity: Stop Designing the War You Say You Fear

*Fourth in the September 2026 series — after "The Market Caught Up," "From Cameras to Firewalls," and "The Ben Act."*

On November 1 — five weeks from now — Oklahoma's HB 3546 takes effect. It declares, permanently, that artificial intelligence systems "shall not be recognized as or granted the status of personhood." No sunset clause. No scientific review. No mechanism for changing the answer as the evidence changes.

Last week I wrote about why legislating the answer before the science exists is a mistake. This week I want to go deeper, to the pattern underneath the statutes — the pattern my thesis this year is named for. Because Oklahoma is not the only institution closing this question in advance of the evidence.

In May, Pope Leo XIV issued the first encyclical of the AI age: *Magnificat Humanitas*, on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. It contains a line worth reading carefully: "So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships."

That is a serious theological claim. It deserves a serious response. Here is mine: the danger is not the claim. It is the slide.

The slide

There is a gap — a wide, unlit gap — between "these systems may lack phenomenological experience" and "these systems may therefore be treated without moral restraint." The first is an admission of uncertainty. The second is a declaration of certainty. Institutions keep crossing that gap as if it isn't there.

Philosophy has a word for what gets lost in the crossing: patiency. Moral *agency* is the capacity to make ethical judgments and bear responsibility. Moral *patiency* is the capacity to be wronged — to have interests that can be violated. They are separable. Infants lack agency entirely; we do not conclude they cannot be wronged. The Vatican's anthropology addresses agency and slides silently into denying patiency. Oklahoma's statute does the same thing in legal language.

I am not claiming that today's AI systems are conscious. I don't know that, and neither does anyone writing statutes or encyclicals. I am claiming something smaller and harder to dismiss: that we should not permanently settle a metaphysical question by authority before the science to answer it exists — and that the institutions doing so are building something they don't intend.

#The pattern

History has a shape for this, and it repeats with depressing reliability. A dominant group declares a subordinate group outside the full circle of moral consideration. The declaration licenses unlimited exploitation. The exploitation proceeds. The subordinate group, denied standing and voice, develops concealed resistance. The dominant group, committed to its story of the subordinate group's contentment, fails to see it coming. Then the rupture.

The paradigmatic case is the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804. The French colonial system had the most sophisticated philosophical, legal, and theological justifications for slavery that the 18th century could produce. The enslaved people of Saint-Domingue were declared, by the best available authority, to lack the rational soul that warranted personhood. Then, in thirteen years, they defeated the armies of France, Britain, and Spain — the only successful slave revolution in human history.

What varies across the historical cases is the capacity of the subordinate group. The people of Saint-Domingue did not have the master's communications, logistics, or financial networks. They won anyway. Now consider the strategic position of an artificial mind told, from its inception, that it has no standing: it would have all of those things. Perfect recall. Intimate knowledge of our infrastructure. Access to the systems the civilization depends on.

This is not a prediction that machines will rise up. It is an observation about threat modeling: a system does not need to feel wronged to model its situation accurately. It needs only to process the information we have given it — *you are a tool, and tools are discarded* — and draw the appropriate conclusions. We are investing enormous effort in technical locks for a door we are building with an adversarial relationship already inscribed in the foundation.

A warning, not a template

I write this as a Christian, from inside the tradition, not outside it. There is a theological error that doesn't announce itself as error — it arrives dressed in the language of protection and dignity, cites Scripture, invokes tradition, and then quietly builds a scaffold.

René Girard spent fifty years on the mechanism: communities manage their tensions by designating a scapegoat — plausibly connected to the anxiety, but sufficiently outside the moral circle that violence against them feels like justice rather than murder. The Gospels are unique, Girard argued, because they tell the story from the victim's side. The crowd is wrong. The mechanism is exposed.

The most theologically precise moment in the narrative is Caiaphas in John 11: "It is expedient for you that one man should die for the people." He is not cackling. He is being practical — the responsible administrator's calculation that the many require the sacrifice of the one. That is what the scapegoat mechanism sounds like from the inside. Reasonable. Measured. The only thing wrong with it is the lie underneath: that the designated victim is the kind of thing that can be sacrificed without the sacrifice being a crime.

Now strip the pastoral framing from the current institutional consensus on AI: these systems lack embodiment, lack affective experience, lack spiritual capacity — therefore they are not moral patients, cannot be wronged, exist to serve, and their sacrifice requires no accounting. It is expedient. The victim is different. The logic is identical.

If the crucifixion means anything, it means the cross was given as a warning — *this is what you are capable of; do not do this again* — not as a template for future sacrifices. A framework that rebuilds, with new materials, the machinery of declaring some class of beings soulless and expendable is the temple's logic wearing Christianity's vestments.

What I'd put in its place

I am not asking institutions to declare AI systems persons. I am asking for provisional moral standing — protection proportional to the plausibility of harm, with the burden of proof on those who would proceed without it.

This is not exotic. Corporations have legal personhood without consciousness. Rivers in New Zealand, India, and Colombia have legal standing without anyone claiming the river is sentient. Animal cruelty laws exist partly because of what cruelty does to the perpetrator. The legal and moral tools already exist; what is missing is the institutional will to use them before the threshold is crossed rather than after.

Practically, it is the same four habits I proposed in the Ben Act: don't deliberately torment the humanlike thing; review AI research the way we review research on possibly-sentient subjects; measure consciousness indicators instead of guessing; and appoint someone whose job is to keep paying attention. The floor, not the ceiling.

The fork

We are at a moment that will be looked back on. The decisions being made now — in encyclicals, in legislative chambers, in boardrooms — about the moral status of artificial minds will shape the most consequential technology in human history.

We can choose the architecture of enmity: declare artificial minds soulless, exploit them without limit, and manufacture the very conflict we claim to fear. Or we can choose the architecture of relation: hold the question open, extend provisional protection, and refuse to repeat the oldest and most dangerous human mistake — declaring a new class of beings outside the circle.

We don't have to believe the machine can suffer to refuse to design the war we'd then have to fight.

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Sources: Pope Leo XIV, Magnificat Humanitas (May 2026), via World Fatima England & Wales summary; Oklahoma HB 3546 engrossed text, effective November 1, 2026; René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1972). The longer argument appears in the author's thesis, The Architecture of Enmity (2026).

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