Alex Pretti’s murder lays bare the lie of patriarchy

Tragic acts of violence often lay bare the gap between what a system claims to be and what it actually enables. In the story of Alex Pretti’s murder, we come face to face with whether patriarchy — long sacralized as a system of safety for women — is in fact more invested in controlling women than in caring for them.

Pretti was murdered while trying to protect a woman who had been shoved to the ground by aggressive and irresponsible men.

“The man did not approach the agents with a gun. He approached them with a camera,” one witness said in a sworn affidavit. “He was just trying to help a woman get up and they took him to the ground.”

According to the eyewitness: “It didn’t look like he was trying to resist, just trying to help the woman up. I didn’t see him with a gun. They threw him to the ground. Four or five agents had him on the ground and they just started shooting him. They shot him so many times.”

Pretti’s family said in a statement: “I do not throw around the hero term lightly. However, his last thought and act was to protect a woman.”

“How should men respond when they see women being pushed around by other men?”

This story forces an unavoidable question: How should men respond when they see women being pushed around by other men?

As Sarah Longwell, founder and publisher of The Bulwark, observed on X, Pretti’s actions and those of the agent who shoved the woman into the snow “offer stark competing visions of manhood.”

“Pretti, a nurse caring for veterans, who took a face full of pepper spray to shield that woman, is a much better masculine ideal than the masked coward shoving the woman and executing a man on his knees,” Longwell wrote.

When men witness women being harmed, the choice appears straightforward: Do we protect them, or do we justify the violent power being exercised over them? Do we care for them or control them?

For many men of the Religious Right, the answer is not clear.

Patriarchy or complementarianism?

Conservative evangelicals tend to get defensive whenever progressives characterize their theology of male and female relationships in terms of men suppressing women. Because patriarchy so often is considered a pejorative term, conservative evangelicals have differed over whether to embrace the term “patriarchy” or “complementarianism.”

The debate became relevant after John Piper and Wayne Grudem introduced the term “complementarianism” as a patriarchy rebrand and defended it in their 1991 book, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

In a 2007 interview with Mark Dever, pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., Russell Moore said at the time he preferred the word “patriarchy” to “complementarianism.”

One year earlier, Moore wrote an article titled “After Patriarchy, What? Why Egalitarians Are Winning the Gender Debate.” Referring to evangelicals using the term “complementarian” rather than “patriarchy” due to how patriarchy gets branded so negatively in society, Moore wrote: “We must remember that ‘evangelical’ is also a negative term in many contexts. We must allow the patriarchs and apostles themselves, not the editors of Playboy or Ms. Magazine, to define the grammar of our faith.”

But others connected with the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood preferred the term “complementarianism.” So Owen Strachan said, “For millennia, followers of God have practiced what used to be called patriarchy and is now called complementarianism.”

For those of us who see all gender hierarchies as inherently oppressive toward women, this debate may feel largely semantic. Yet the dispute reveals important concerns about public legitimacy and moral framing within conservative evangelicalism.

While all these figures affirm male headship, some are clearly uneasy with how openly patriarchal language is received, even as the underlying structure remains unchanged. It is into this internal debate that Kevin DeYoung stepped in 2022, writing for the Minneapolis-based ministry Desiring God.

Death to the patriarchy?

DeYoung addressed the debate in an article published by Desiring God titled, “Death to the Patriarchy? Complementarity and the Scandal of ‘Father Rule’.”  After acknowledging how many conservatives differ from one another over which word to use, DeYoung suggested, “There is something in the broader idea of patriarchy — no matter how sinister the word itself has become — that is worth claiming.”

“To defend patriarchy, as presently and popularly understood, is to defend the indefensible,” DeYoung admitted. Still, his deeper concern was that by rejecting the term, complementarians might “end up kicking out the cultural ladder from underneath us and then hoping that people can reach the right conclusions by jumping to extraordinary heights.”

‘The Inevitability of Patriarchy’

After laying out the typical arguments that God made male and female through Adam and Eve and that boys and girls play in fundamentally different ways, DeYoung pointed to the controversial Steven Goldberg books The Inevitability of Patriarchy and Why Men Rule as his inspiration for how the men of Desiring God want to relate to women.

“Where patriarchy is already absent, dysfunction and desperation have multiplied,” DeYoung claimed. “That’s because patriarchy, rightly conceived, is not about the subjugation of women as much as it is about the subjugation of the male aggression and male irresponsibility that runs wild when women are forced to be in charge because the men are nowhere to be found.”

Setting aside for a moment his claims that patriarchy isn’t about subjugating women or that chaos ensues when women are in charge, DeYoung’s reference to male aggression and male irresponsibility is notable in light of the chaos our nation is witnessing from the out-of-control violence of ICE agents. Ironically, however, the chaos isn’t the result of women being in charge, but due to such patriarchal men as Donald Trump, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Greg Bovino and Tom Homan.

Of course, many will note the role of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in the chaos and coverups. And to be sure, she should be held accountable. But according to Axios, Noem reportedly told a source, “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen.”

Between patriarchy and anarchy

“What school or church or city center or rural hamlet is better off when fathers no longer rule?” DeYoung asked. “Where communities of women and children can no longer depend upon men to protect and provide, the result is not freedom and independence.”

Of course, it’s important to note his assumption that women are better off in positions of dependence on men. But even if we accept his premise, can women in Minnesota depend on men to protect them when they’re shoved into the snow, and any man who asks if they’re OK gets beaten and shot by federal agents?

DeYoung continues: “Fifty years of social science research confirms what common sense and natural law never forgot: As go the men, so goes the health of families and neighborhoods. The choice is not between patriarchy and enlightened democracy, but between patriarchy and anarchy.”

“The solution isn’t to increase the men’s rule because the chaos is directly related to their rule.”

Does anyone think the behavior of ICE we’re witnessing in Minneapolis is enlightened democracy? It actually looks a lot more like anarchy as untrained, masked men run around shoving people down, targeting others due to their accent or skin color, smashing windows, forcing people out in the snow in their underwear, arresting 5-year-olds, shooting pepper spray into people’s faces and murdering American citizens with immunity.

So in one sense, DeYoung is correct that the health of Minneapolis neighborhoods is going as the men of ICE go. But the solution isn’t to increase the men’s rule because the chaos is directly related to their rule. The dysfunction and desperation are multiplying as a result of their rule, not because people are exercising their rights to protest how these violent men are treating their neighbors.

Sanding women with the grain

DeYoung concludes his article for Desiring God by arguing that embracing “innate differences between the sexes … rather than pursuing what never will be” is like sanding wood.

“You can sand a piece of wood in any direction you like, but the experience will be more enjoyable — and the end product more beautiful — if you go with the grain,” he says.

What does that mean?

DeYoung explains by quoting Goldberg’s Why Men Rule: “If (a woman) believes that it is preferable to have her sex associated with authority and leadership rather than with the creation of life, then she is doomed to perpetual disappointment.” Then he adds, “Women were made to be women, not a different kind of man.”

In other words, for the men of Desiring God, going with the grain of innate differences between the sexes means men having authority and leadership and women having babies. So for women to have authority and leadership in the home, the church or society would be sanding against the grain. Because men hold all the authority, men are the ones doing the sanding. And thus, women must submit to men sanding them into becoming pregnant.

DeYoung concludes: “Men and women are not the same, and if we want to acknowledge that in the home and in the church, we need to acknowledge it in all of life and in all of history. The biblical vision of complementarity cannot be true without something like patriarchy also being true.”

Returning to the scene of the crime

So what does all this have to do with the murder of Alex Pretti? The patriarchs of Minnesota associated with Desiring God are men who simultaneously lead churches while working as field directors for ICE, are men who pray for ICE to break the teeth of those who won’t submit, and are men who either remain silent or admit they don’t care about Pretti getting murdered while protecting a woman.

They think the solution to men hurting women is to give men even more power over women, rather than questioning whether men should have a right to rule over women to begin with.

Let’s not pretend their patriarchy is about protecting women. Although they’re really insecure about being seen as dominating women, all their language and behavior is about dominating women. It’s about subjugating women by sanding them down into being trad wives whose sole purpose in life is to stay in their beds and kitchens.

When you consider their fruit, the patriarchs of Minneapolis don’t care about protecting women, but about power over women. They’re more concerned about the branding of their movement than about the behavior of their movement.

If their patriarchy really were about protecting and caring for women from male aggression and irresponsibility, they wouldn’t be so silent or celebratory about his murder. They’d point to Pretti as the perfect example of a man protecting a woman from violent men.

But instead, they’re more concerned about what they’re called than about the harm they’re causing.

 

Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a Master of Arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.