As the Orthodox Christian artist and thinker Jonathan Pageau is wont to say, “Symbolism happens!” Symbolism, he explains, “is not so much an arbitrary allegorical representation of something, but rather the very pattern by which we notice meaning.”
Sitting by the fire in the predawn pall of this bitter Minnesota winter, I found myself gazing into the abyss of recent events—and, to my surprise, not seeing darkness reflected back, but a light splitting the abyss and radiating from its very center.
Specifically, I have been reflecting on two cataclysmic public killings that have torn at the fabric of the United States—and at my own interior world—in recent months: the gruesome onstage assassination of Charlie Kirk on a Utah college campus on September 10, 2025, and what I can only describe as the public execution of Alex Pretti by agents of the U.S. federal government on an icy Minneapolis street on January 24, 2026.
My contemplation has repeatedly returned to the same question: how is it that two equally heartbreaking killings—both chillingly captured on video and seared into the collective consciousness—generated such diametrically opposite responses from vast swathes of the population? Including many people I know personally.
The common story holds that this gulf is the result of two warring political tribes—the “right” and the “left,” or even the “far right” and the “radical left”—who see the world in irreconcilable, zero-sum terms. Having spent several years intentionally cultivating, and often failing to cultivate, relationships with people across this spectrum, and having ventured deeply into their respective online spaces, I respectfully disagree. What ails us is not primarily the story of two parties, but the far older story of two spirits.
To gaze at length upon the tsunami of depraved responses to each of these killings—ranging from indifference, to casual justification, to outright celebration, to painstakingly orchestrated campaigns of lies and character annihilation—is certainly to risk inviting the abyss to gaze back into one’s own soul. As I did so, however, the darkness of the abyss spoke—and named itself: the spirit of the accuser.
It became clear to me that while the widespread hardness of heart differed in its targets, it shared a common posture. In the biblical texts, the Hebrew śāṭān and the Greek diabolos both mean adversary or accuser—one who slanders, divides, and prosecutes. This posture, common to the darkness on both “sides,” is an ancient human archetype, as old as the first brother to spill the blood of his own brother.
But darkness was not all that I encountered there. For just as the darkness named itself, its antidote shone forth from that same center: the spirit of the embracer.
Having had no prior affinity for either man—I was aware of Kirk but had not followed his work, and Pretti was not a public figure—I took their deaths as cues to learn more about each of them. I have a rule for myself, written down among a set of principles I strive to live by: never accept at face value someone else’s characterization of another’s positions, actions, intentions, or character. Always go directly to the original sources, in depth and in good faith, and derive one’s assessment firsthand.
What I learned was that both of these men epitomized the essence of the spirit of the embracer.
There are hundreds of long-form videos of Kirk—several hours of which I watched myself—showing him voluntarily engaging thousands of often hostile college students while treating each with remarkable decency and generosity of spirit. He routinely invited those who most disagreed with him to the front of the line. Despite his erudition, poise, and the obvious pressures of the setting, he consistently declined the easy opportunity to humiliate or belittle even his most strident interlocutors. Instead, without yielding on principle, he adopted a posture of welcoming, humanizing, and embracing. He engaged with such good faith that he would often help challengers refine their arguments, congratulate those who argued well, and explicitly acknowledge their strongest points.
In his private life, he was a devoted husband and father. Speaking after his death, his wife Erika tearfully recalled, “Every day he would ask me, ‘How can I serve you better? How can I be a better husband? How can I be a better father?’ Every day.”
At 12:23 p.m. on Wednesday, September 10, 2025, while engaging students at Utah Valley University in his characteristic manner, Charlie Kirk was killed by an assassin’s bullet for holding and expressing views with which his killer disagreed. He was just 31 years old.
While Pretti lacked Kirk’s extensive public record, compelling testimonies to his character emerged swiftly in the aftermath of his death—borne out even by the circumstances surrounding it. Just after 9 a.m. on Saturday, January 24, 2026, video footage shows Pretti participating in widespread protests against aggressive immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis. As he recorded law enforcement activity on his phone, he positioned himself between an agent and a woman the agent had pushed to the ground, placing an arm around her.
He was then pepper-sprayed and pinned to the ground by multiple federal agents. While restrained, with approximately six agents surrounding him, a legally concealed-carried handgun was removed from his person immediately before he was shot and killed. Within seconds, no fewer than ten rounds had been discharged into his body.
Everything about his final gesture toward the woman he sought to protect—his occupation as an intensive care nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Hospital, and the accounts shared by family, friends, and colleagues—speaks of a man committed to service and responsibility. He was just 37 years old.
In the aftermath of their respective killings, both men were widely criticized—and their deaths even justified—for having had the temerity to defend and exercise their constitutionally protected First and Second Amendment rights immediately prior to being killed. In a tragic triumph of expedience over principle, it was seemingly lost on many that, in reacting to Pretti, they contradicted their own prior public stances in response to Kirk.
I am under no illusion that either man was a saint1 in every moment or dimension of life. The point is that both were sufficiently upright along crucial dimensions for their combined symbolism to be deeply resonant in our current moment. Both men were of the character to show up, to step up, and to bear the burdens placed before them; of the character to place themselves—figuratively and, in the end, literally—in the line of fire for their convictions; of the character to encounter the two archetypal spirits with which each of us must daily wrestle and to die possessed of the higher.
Taken together, I see their deaths as a symbol pointing toward a way forward—through the darkness that now threatens to tear us apart—an invitation to reorder our hierarchy of values and to place the highest spirit, the spirit of the embracer, at its apex.
We moderns often pride ourselves on having outgrown “anachronistic” notions such as being possessed by a spirit. I suggest this is not the achievement we imagine it to be, but rather a self-inflicted handicap—one that has rendered us incapable of detecting and guarding against the spirits we nonetheless invoke and by which we are subsequently possessed. There are many accounts of traditional and Indigenous peoples expressing disbelief at our ineptitude in such matters. In pursuit of our own “enlightenment,” we appear to have gouged out our eyes.
In our endarkenment, the adversary has spawned entire fields explicitly founded upon the spirit of the accuser. Whole disciplines now rest upon the hermeneutics of suspicion—an interpretive stance that treats surface meanings as suspect by default.
In the humanities and much of the social sciences—literary studies, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, critical legal studies, education theory—this posture is not merely common but often normative. We have steeped whole generations in the spirit of the accuser.
Politics—the domain of deriving mutually agreeable tradeoffs at scale—lies downstream of worship. If we enshrine the spirit of the accuser at the apex of our hierarchy of value, we will be capable only of indictment, division, dehumanization, and, in the final analysis, violence. It is an ancient, oft-repeated, and terrible pattern.
But if a critical mass of us can find it within ourselves to look beyond the darkness to the even more ancient spirit of the embracer—to adopt a renewed hermeneutics of gratitude and grace—we may yet be afforded a generative politics in which we can surface and work through the difficult and necessary issues before us, in love.
Possessed by such a spirit, I would even dare to suggest that many of what now appear to be insurmountable problems would simply dissolve. For according to the deepest and oldest story, the embracer has already overcome the accuser.
All that remains is for us to accept His invitation.
- Note my follow-up to this point in my post, 13 Things I Simultaneously (and Provisionally) Believe to be True, in which I explain that information about Pretti’s conduct prior to his killing—information that came to my attention only after I published this piece—altered my view of the symmetry I invoked in this piece. Specifically, I acknowledge that the symmetry I drew between Kirk and Pretti in this post was mistaken, unfair to Kirk, and overly generous to Pretti and that the highest form of grace is nonetheless radically asymmetrical. ↩︎
Deliberative Dad 