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.”

Images of Alex Pretti assisting a woman and then being attacked by ICE (screencaps)

“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.

Kevin DeYoung

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.”

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