Published January 26, 2026
By now, your social media feeds are litigating the death of Alex Pretti at the hands of federal officers in Minneapolis on Saturday. This follows the recent death of Renee Good, a woman who was shot and killed after her vehicle struck a federal officer while she was protesting immigration enforcement in Minneapolis. At present, all that is publicly known is that a confrontation occurred between Pretti and federal officers that resulted in Pretti’s death.
Depending on whose feed you read, Minneapolis is either home to a gallant band of individuals like Pretti and Good, defending civil liberties against an out-of-control government agency, or a city whose feckless leadership has enabled out-of-control leftist agitation in defense of immigrants with no legal right to be in the United States. These competing interpretations function as ciphers, decoding the different moral universes Americans now inhabit. In the aftermath of these events—at least on social media—Minneapolis appears as a tempest of conflict that threatens to spill into even greater tragedy.
Let me state what matters most in moments like this: No one—and I mean no one—has access to all the facts surrounding Pretti’s death. Even a detailed video breakdown cannot give us the whole picture. Those details will be sorted out as investigations proceed. Until the facts are known, we should refrain from assigning legal blame for these deaths. Instead, we should wait for facts and evidence, and for due process, before rendering any definitive judgment (Deuteronomy 19:15-21).
That said, because Christianity speaks to issues of due process and moral action more broadly, the Christian worldview has something to say in this moment. The deaths of Good and Pretti did not need to happen. Not because we can already conclude that law enforcement acted wrongly, but because these deaths followed from choices that placed individuals in volatile and dangerous situations. The chain of events could have been avoided. Even if an investigation were to conclude that Pretti or Good were unjustly or even illegally killed, a moral reality would still remain: They should never have been in those situations in the first place.
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Andrew T. Walker, Ph.D., is a Fellow in the Evangelicals and Civic Life Program at The Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is also the Dean of the School of Theology and Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and the founding Managing Editor of WORLD Opinions. He co-hosts The Bully Pulpit, a weekly podcast exploring faith, culture, and politics from a conservative Christian perspective.
