Presenting The Alabama Murders from Revisionist History

Summary

Talking Feds — Special Episode: Presenting The Alabama Murders from Revisionist History

Podcast: Talking Feds
Host: Harry Litman
Featured Podcast: Revisionist History (Malcolm Gladwell)
Episode Title: The Alabama Murders, Ep. 1: "The True Church"
Date: November 6, 2025

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Overview

This special episode of Talking Feds diverges from its usual political roundtable to present the premiere of Malcolm Gladwell's new Revisionist History season: "The Alabama Murders." The story examines the case of Charles Sennett, a Church of Christ minister in Alabama who, while conducting an affair, orchestrated his wife's murder in the late 1980s—a crime that would see several men, including Kenny Smith, sentenced to death. Gladwell uses this story as a lens to critique failures—legal, moral, and institutional—within American systems ostensibly dedicated to justice. The episode not only uncovers the specifics of the case but also explores the deep roots of shame, repression, and the complicated cultural world of the Church of Christ in rural Alabama.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Set-Up & Series Introduction

• Harry Litman introduces the episode as a somber critique of American cruelty and dysfunctional justice systems, flagging it as “compelling and discomforting.”
• Malcolm Gladwell explains his interest was piqued by a conversation with psychologist Kate Porterfield, who had worked with Kenny Smith, a man on death row in Alabama (04:05).
  • Gladwell’s core question: Why does our justice system so often intensify suffering in its attempt to address it? (05:00)

2. Meetings with Kate Porterfield (Clinical Perspective)

• Kate Porterfield describes her meetings with Kenny Smith, focusing on his emotional response after his botched execution:
  • "He wanted to talk for the first probably two hours of our visit about how beautiful his goodbyes were and the love he received from his family as he was going into the execution." — Kate Porterfield (04:07)
  • She finds it powerful that, after trauma, he fixated not on anger or fear but on familial love.
• Gladwell clarifies: “What happened was a botched execution, punishment for a crime that took place over 30 years before...” (04:57)

3. Setting: The Shoals and the Church of Christ

• Gladwell details northwestern Alabama (“the Shoals”: Sheffield, Tuscumbia, Muscle Shoals, Florence) as a semi-insular, deeply religious region (06:20).
  • "You just don't happen here. You have to want to come to Florence." — Grant Asbel (07:28)
• The area is a central stronghold for the Church of Christ denomination, known for its rigid rules and emphasis on acapella worship (09:03).

4. Inside the Church of Christ

• Lee Camp (theologian, Lipscomb University) lays out unique Church customs—acapella singing, plain buildings, rule-centered faith (09:37–11:25).
  • “When someone says, I’m a member of the Church of Christ, that means that they are members of the true church that restored New Testament Christianity and everybody else is wrong...” — Lee Camp (12:32)
• The Church is depicted as intimate but potentially repressive:
  • “I love and hate churches of Christ...the latter part of the 20th century have done a lot of damage to a lot of people, including me...there’s always the danger that you’ll be kind of cut off.” — Lee Camp (14:08)
• Rules are stringent—no divorce except for adultery, no female participation in worship, no dancing or "mixed bathing” (public swimming across genders), no musical instruments, with strident social enforcement (15:33–16:44).

5. The Sennetts and Small-Town Scandal

• Charles Sennett had been a charismatic preacher, credited as both dynamic and caring, but also secretive and unstable (17:10–22:08).
• Multiple congregants recall his charm and supportiveness, while whispers of affairs circulated in hushed tones due to the profound stigma surrounding marital failure in their community (19:39–22:08).
  • "My mother called him a ladies man." — (20:12)
• Sennett’s life unraveled after he was confronted with potential divorce and mounting debt, leading to erratic behavior and mental health crises (23:08).

6. Cultural Consequences of Shame and Rule-Bound Religion

• The program probes how strict Church doctrines create deep, immobilizing shame for those who break the rules—especially for leaders like Sennett (25:02–26:54).
  • “When you’re in a context of overwhelming shame, it can do terrifying things to the psyche.” — Lee Camp (26:07)
• Stories of “disfellowshipping” and fear of shaming are common, with little room for forgiveness or “grace” (14:08, 26:54).
• Grant Asbel shares a powerful metaphor:
  • "If you fell out of an airplane and you said a cuss word on the way down and you didn’t have a chance to repent of that word before you hit the ground, then...your soul might be lost to damnation..." (28:19)

7. Trapped by Doctrine: No Way Out for Sennett

• Sennett’s psychological crisis is traced to the intersection of personal failing and an unforgiving religious community:
  • “There’s no viable route to a greater happiness with the other woman because it’s simply not going to be permitted unless you leave the community...I would conjecture...the sense of shame is overwhelming.” — Lee Camp (29:52)
  • “It was easier to get forgiveness in the Church of Christ for murdering somebody than it was to be divorced.” (30:41)

8. Failure Cascade: From Personal Crisis to Catastrophe

• Gladwell frames the entire story as a “failure cascade”—a series of moral, emotional, and institutional breakdowns triggered by a single root failing, with consequences spreading outward (31:02–32:59).
  • “The Alabama murders is about a classic failure cascade, only...the ever widening ripples were caused not by mechanical or institutional defects, but failures of character, of justice, of compassion.” (32:59)

9. Foreshadowing What’s to Come

• The episode closes with mentions of community reactions, the botched execution, and hints at the broader implications for how justice is dispensed (33:13–34:26).
  • “He was having an affair with a parishioner. There weren’t 70 people that went to that church. How did they not know that this was going on?” (33:26)
  • “What is taught, either in nursing school or as an EMT or as a doctor cannot be lifted into the death chamber—like, it’s not the same place.” — Kate Porterfield (34:09)
  • "He would say to himself...Turn to the right, to the victim's family and apologize. Turn to the left. Tell my family I love him." (34:09)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “He talked to me about love for probably two, two and a half hours, to the point where I had to say, 'You know, this is incredible ... I want to know what happened.'” — Kate Porterfield (04:05)
• “When someone says, 'I’m a member of the Church of Christ,' that means that they are members of the true church...and everybody else is wrong and this is the true church.” — Lee Camp (12:32)
• “If you fell out of an airplane and you said a cuss word on the way down and you didn’t have a chance to repent ... your soul might be lost to damnation for eternity.” — Grant Asbel (28:19)
• “It was easier to get forgiveness in the Church of Christ for murdering somebody than it was to be divorced.” — Lee Camp (30:41)
• “The Alabama murders is about a classic failure cascade, only ... ripples were caused not by mechanical or institutional defects, but failures of character, of justice, of compassion.” — Malcolm Gladwell (32:59)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:43 Introduction by Malcolm Gladwell to the series and his interest in the Kenny Smith case
• 04:05 Kate Porterfield describes her meetings with death row inmate Kenny Smith
• 05:39 Gladwell articulates the central moral and institutional questions
• 07:28 Grant Asbel describes the insular nature of Florence and its church community
• 09:37–11:25 Lee Camp details the unique practices of the Church of Christ
• 12:32 Camp explains the Church’s narrow claim to “truth”
• 14:08 Camp on the pain and exclusion embedded in Church practices
• 16:44 Amusing anecdote on church taboos and the fear of sin
• 23:08 Sennett’s unraveling: debt, marital breakdown, and mental crisis
• 26:07–26:54 Camp and Gladwell discuss the psychological toll of shame without grace
• 28:19 Asbel’s "airplane cuss word" metaphor on fear and damnation
• 29:52 Discussion of why divorce, not murder, was "unforgivable"
• 31:02–32:59 Gladwell’s framing of the narrative as a “failure cascade”
• 34:09 Porterfield on the execution process and its trauma

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Conclusion

Gladwell’s The Alabama Murders begins not with the salacious details of a crime, but by immersing listeners in the dense weave of Southern religious tradition, the heavy burden of shame, and the ways rules can become cruelty. The episode suggests that justice, when filtered through the lens of uncompromising doctrine, often deepens and perpetuates suffering rather than resolving it. This is as much an exploration of cultural context—how a community polices its own, and what happens when someone cannot live within its constraints—as it is of the crime itself. The stage is set for a searing look at both individual breakdown and systemic failure, and the rippling costs they create.

For the full story and ensuing investigation, listen to the entire season of Revisionist History: The Alabama Murders.

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End of summary.

Transcript

[A]

Hi everyone, Harry here. Normally I'd be coming to you with another one on one conversation today, but things are working a little differently this week. We wanted to get you my conversation with Carol Leonig and Aaron Davis on their certain to be bestseller on the Department of Justice injustice on the very first day of its publication. The book is a rich and meticulously researched account of the turbulent ordeals at DOJ over the last seven years. If you haven't listened yet, I hope you'll check it out. It's the first conversation Carol and Aaron taped on the book and it's wide ranging and I think very insightful. But not to leave you empty handed this third Thursday. Instead, we have a really special offering Today, we're sharing another podcast. And not just any other podcast, rather. It is the first episode in the new season of Malcolm Gladwell's blockbuster podcast series Revisionist History, which focuses in Malcolm's signature style on overlooked and misunderstood episodes in American history. This season is entitled the Alabama Murders, and it tells the story of Charles Sennett, an Alabama Church of Christ minister who, while having an affair, arranged for three men to murder his wife. One of the men convicted in the murder, Kenny Smith, spent decades on death row, only for his execution to go horribly wrong. The series isn't about just this one case, though. It's about how the systems we've created to bring fairness and justice too often only uphold an illusion of those values and instead result in legal, moral and institutional failures. As I think you'll see, the Alabama Murders is a simple but searing critique of cruelty in America, and I think you'll find it both compelling and discomforting. To hear the full story, go to Revisionist History, available wherever you get your podcasts. Talk to you later.

[B]

Pushkin.

[C]

Hello.

[B]

Hello, Malcolm here. Before we get to the episode, I want to let you know you can get this entire season now ad free by subscribing to Revisionist History on Pushkin. Sign up on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin fm. Plus Pushkin subscribers can access ad free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows. A little while ago, a friend of mine told me, you have to meet this person I know, Kate Porterfield. She's got the strangest job in America. So I did. We got together, Porterfield and I, in a little conference room in Manhattan. I just want to understand how you ended up where you are.

[D]

So you're kind of viewing, as we're just talking, you're thinking about whether there's Something here that will, that'll evolve over time that you would imagine being putting in the podcast. Is that, is that kind of what you're thinking?

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Porterfield is a psychologist. We talked for a few hours, then again and again, one conversation leading to another, until she began to talk about a case that had affected her deeply. Although she doesn't use the word case. She says person, a man on death row.

[D]

When I first went to see Kenny, so now it had been two months since the execution attempt. He wanted to talk for the first probably two hours of our visit about how beautiful his goodbyes were and the love he received from his family as he was going into the execution. That's what he wanted to start with. And I found this so powerful and also fascinating, honestly, as a clinician, because what I first thought was, oh, he's avoiding, right. He can't talk about the execution. He talked to me about love for probably two, two and a half hours, to the point where I had to say, you know, this is incredible and I'm so happy you're sharing it. And I'm not surprised. I also though, I want to know what happened.

[B]

What happened was a botched execution, punishment for a crime that took place over 30 years before. A river of blood that had already claimed the lives of three others. Kate Porterfield told me her version of events. Then I went out and got other people's versions of what happened. And that's where the story I'm about to tell you comes from. I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way. And the other question, maybe the more important question is why have we created a system that in trying to respond to suffering, all too often makes suffering worse?

[D]

He made me really pause and think a lot. Watching someone only start from a place of love after something so horrible was. I had never seen that before.

[B]

Welcome to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is a special seven episode series, the Alabama Murders, Episode one, the True Church. So we're now in. Are we in Florence here?

[E]

Yes.

[B]

Yeah. This story takes place in northwestern Alabama in an area called the Shoals. The so called Alabama Black Belt. The broad flat swath of fertile farmland where the old antebellum cotton plantations were established, is several hours drive to the south. This is Rolling Hills, Appalachia, not the Mississippi Delta. Four towns on either side of the Tennessee River. Sheffield, Tuscumbia, Mussel Shoals and Florence. Sheffield is working class Struggling Muscle Shoals is a spiritual home of rhythm and blues. Tuscumbia is famous for being the birthplace of Helen Keller. Florence is the largest, a graceful town of beautiful pre war buildings with a Frank Lloyd Wright house downtown.

[F]

You know, there's no interstate that runs through Florence. There's no major airport. So it's a little bit of a closed society almost. It's really neat.

[B]

I started going to Alabama after talking to Kate Porterfield. And on one of my first trips, I met a man named Grant Asbel, a preacher, early 40s, big beard, baseball cap, though not on Sunday morning, of course. He was my guide to Florence.

[F]

You know, there's good music, there's good art, there's good food, but you just don't happen here. You have to want to. To come to Florence.

[B]

This is the place where it all started, with a personal transgression, a matter of the heart, by another preacher, a man named Charles Sennett.

[F]

I was only seven years old when it happened, but I remember it being really disconcerting because if you're in this group and like in our. In this area in particular, I mean, you've been to Florence. Florence, you don't get here by accident. And so the idea that someone within this framework could do something like Charles Sennett did was very disruptive. It was talked about kind of in hushed tones. I was talking to our local. He goes to church with us here. He's actually the historian for the city of Florence. And he was telling me that one of the preachers in one of the churches in town, while that was going on, got up in the pulpit and said, charles Senate is a faithful Christian brother. The things that are being said about him are lies with the idea. Right? He is a faithful Church of Christ member and almost incapable of this kind of thing.

[B]

In Alabama, the Shoals is the spiritual center of the Protestant denomination known as the Church of Christ. There are many, many Church of Christ congregations within an hour's drive of Florence. And I don't think that any of the things we're going to explore over the course of this series will make sense unless you first understand something about this denomination. If I blindfolded you and put you in a early 1980s Church of Christ congregation, how long would it take you before you knew you were in Church of Christ?

[C]

I would know in about three minutes or less.

[B]

This is Lee Camp, who has taught theology for years at Lipscomb University in Nashville, one of the most prestigious of the many universities around the United States affiliated with the Church of Christ. What would be the tip off?

[C]

Well, the singing would be a cappella is the first thing. And so, you know, the only place you're going to find a cappella singing is probably either going to be Mennonites or Church of Christ, maybe Church of the Brethren. And then there are going to be certain phrases that are going to get said that would just be a tip off that, you know, this is where they are in the prayers. They're going to say, lord, guard, guide and direct us. I don't know. There would just be language like that that I would immediately know.

[B]

By the way, for those of you who know something about country music, what do Waylon Jennings, Roy Orbison, Loretta Lynn, Glenn Campbell, Dwight Yocum, Pat Boone, Crystal Gale, I could go on. All have in common. They all came out of the acapella tradition of the Church of Christ. It's not Sunday morning. I just take you to a church. It's empty. How long does it take you to know that you're in a Church of Christ? There's no one in there. You look around, what do you see? That's the tip off. No organ.

[C]

There's no organ. And just the whole architecture is very, very simple. There's lack of pretense. There's certainly no art on the walls. There's no Stations of the Cross. There's pews. And there's. On the one side at the front is going to be a board that shows attendance contribution numbers. On the other side is going to be a board that has the hymn numbers that you slide in with the numbers. And in the middle is going to be a simple pulpit.

[B]

I know about the Church of Christ because my best friend is the screenwriter Charles Randolph, whose father, Dale, was a Church of Christ minister who went to Lipscomb. And once when I was visiting Lipscomb, the same school where Lee Camp teaches, a little old lady came up to me and said, are you Dale Randolph's famous son Chuck's friend? Yes, I am. And while I'm playing this game, I should point out that halfway through my conversation with Grant Asbel, I discovered that he did his doctorate at Lipscomb with Lee Camp. The point is that the Church of Christ is a very small world. It's a family. Now, you're from Alabama.

[C]

I am from Alabama.

[B]

You were born in Talladega. Talladega.

[C]

And it's not Talladega or Talladega, it's Talladega.

[B]

Talladega. And you grew up in the Church of Christ.

[C]

I did.

[B]

When you say that you are. That you belong to the Church of Christ, what are you saying about what does that mean? How's that different from I'm a Baptist?

[C]

Well, it depends on who you're talking to and where they are in their experience of churches of Christ. But when someone says, I'm a member of the Church of Christ, that means that they are members of the true church that restored New Testament Christianity and everybody else is wrong and that this is the true church. That's not a denomination, that's not Protestant, it's not Catholic. It's just the true church.

[B]

In the taxonomy of Southern Protestantism, there are the Pentecostals, the singing, the swaying, speaking in tongues, emotion. The Church of Christ isn't that. Then there are the fundamentalists, the Southern Baptists, fire and brimstone. The Church of Christ isn't that either. The Baptists and the Pentecostals can sometimes go on all Sunday afternoon in a church of Christ. You're out in an hour. These are the people of the Book. There are said to be more advanced degrees in the Church of Christ leadership than any of the Southern denominations. They're a church of rules and certainties, simplicity and clarity. A church inspired by the idea that anyone who studies the Bible, reads it closely and thoughtfully, can discern the path to salvation. That's the good part, the beautiful part, but the other part, and by the way, no one is more willing to acknowledge the limitations of the Church of Christ than people who belong to the Church of Christ. Is that the rules, the certainty, the intimacy, can become a straitjacket.

[C]

Like, I love and hate churches of Christ. You know, I love them and I have hated them. And, you know, I love them because I've spent my life doing what I've done with my life because of what I learned in my church. You know, I was loved by my church. I was loved by the people in that church. And yet at the same time that the traditions in the latter part of the 20th century have done a lot of damage to a lot of people, including me, there's a sense of fear, and there's always the danger that you'll be kind of cut off. And so it was kind of fear of just saying, you're not okay. You know, you don't toe the line. And so the church would practice this sort of, on occasion, would practice this sort of disfellowshipping, we called it, where you could literally be socially, you know, estranged, socially disciplined publicly. And then apart from some sort of public statement of repentance, you couldn't be a member of good standing in the church.

[B]

You cannot Divorce your wife. Unless there is a documented case of adultery, full stop. Women cannot participate in a church service.

[A]

Full stop.

[B]

Singing must be a cappella. Instruments are a frivolity.

[C]

You've got, you know, all these taboos around. No dancing, because if you dance, you're going to lust. And if you lust, you're going to go to hell. You know, no mixed bathing, we called it. Which means you're not swimming around people of opposite sex because if you do, you're going to lust and you'll go to hell. One of my favorite stories about kind of illustrating this was that we were on a youth group trip in another town and we were pulling out of the church to go to lunch break and the preacher driving the van, van full of, you know, impressionable 14, 15 year olds, he looks to the left and there's this guy jogging down the sidewalk in his jogging shorts. And we were not permitted to wear shorts in public because of the lust thing. And this guy's jogging down the sidewalk and the preacher looks at him and he says, he looks real nice in those jogging shorts. He'll look real nice in hell.

[B]

This is the world. Charles Sennett, the man at the center of our story belong to. He was born in West Virginia. His father was a Church of Christ preacher. He got married to Elizabeth Dorling in 1962. She was the picture of a preacher's wife. They had two sons together. And by the time she was in her early 40s, Elizabeth was already a grandmother. There are still lots of people in the Shoals who remember the sentence.

[G]

She was a typical. Love my grandbabies. Let me run home, make chocolate chip cookies and keep them over weekend with their family. Their parents can go out and have a date night.

[B]

This is Susan Moseley, a nurse at a local weight loss clinic who became close with Elizabeth.

[G]

You know, brought them babies with her a lot of times. And they, and I made a little thing in there and that little exercise room, little table and chair or coloring books so they could sit there and color while she was with you.

[B]

Charles got a doctorate in divinity in the 1970s, became the preacher at a Church of Christ in Jasper, Alabama, a small town two hours south of the Shoals. He was good. In a few years, he tripled the size of the church. He was handsome, dynamic, a wonderful singing voice in the best church of Christ tradition. At some point in his 30s, at the point his career seemed ascendant, things began to go sideways for Charles Sennett. There were rumors of some indiscretion at the Church of Christ In Jasper. An affair. The elders fired him. If you want to trace the precise moment at which things began to unravel, perhaps it was here because there is a version of events in which he could have stayed in Jasper for his whole career, built upon his success there. To be a minister at a successful Church of Christ is a position of real status. There's a kind of free market in that world. When there's a hot young preacher in town, people will leave their churches and join the Rising Star Senate. Was that Rising Star? But then he lost it all. He was despondent. His family came upon him one night curled up in a ball on the couch. He'd had a nervous breakdown. He became suicidal. He ended up spending weeks in a psychiatric hospital in Birmingham. This is the summary from the medical records of the psychiatric facility where he was hospitalized. Exam reveals an unkempt, hostile, rebellious white male. His thought content is preoccupied, his psychomotor agitated and his affect labile. His mood is depressed, his sensorium confused and his tension level tense. His insight is lacking and his judgment is poor. He found another job, then another. Moved to the Shoals and became the preacher at the west side Church of Christ in Sheffield. Small, working class congregation. Little white church, not Jasper. A step down. Starting over.

[H]

A lot of this that I know was hearsay amongst us all. Yeah, you know how it passes from person to person, Gets bigger or gets smaller. So, yeah, take everything I tell you with a grain of salt because it was all hearsay.

[B]

This is Charlie, Bill and her son Eric. They were members of Charles Sennan's church. And was he. Was he a good preacher?

[E]

Evidently. He must have been charismatic.

[H]

Yes, I would say very charismatic.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. The point.

[H]

My mother called him a ladies man.

[B]

Oh, really? Oh, your mother had a. She had a.

[H]

Did she mean that a way of labeling people?

[B]

Did she mean that in a positive way or in a negative way?

[E]

If my grandmother said it, it was negative. Yeah, she was very conservative and very. Yeah, she. That would have been a very, very negative thing to say about somebody.

[D]

Maybe.

[H]

I could say it's about as pure Church of Christ as you can get.

[B]

There were whispers about a woman in the west side congregation, Doris.

[E]

We heard the, you know, connected rumors that she was involved. Her husband was having some serious issues. I don't know. I reading on it, I almost would think she was seeking. I think he was probably her minister because I think she went to west side one.

[H]

Yeah, I think so at the time. And that's my understanding. I don't know.

[E]

Therefore, I would almost Say she was probably seeking some counseling from him.

[B]

Charles Sennott was in love with a woman who was not his wife. He had a book of poems in his office called Memories of the Heart with Doris picture in it. There were rumors someone saw a valentine Charles had given Doris. I talked with another former member of the west side Church, Carl Rhoden. We sat in his living room. He had a dog on his lap. I'm just curious. Was he a good. Too big?

[I]

This nice fellow here won't be around.

[B]

He was.

[I]

What? Nice?

[B]

Yeah.

[I]

I mean, you just couldn't hardly beat him. Somebody be sick. He'd be the first one there with some food, nursing home. He'd be the first one there with something to eat or, you know.

[B]

Was he a good preacher?

[I]

Yeah, that's why I say he had a split personality, best I can tell.

[B]

Yeah. Do you remember he had been. It came out during the trial that he had been. He had been at a church in Jasper and had been fired from that job because he was the same thing. Having an affair with someone in the church.

[I]

Let's see. They should have told us when they fired him, but didn't nobody say nothing about it to him. Yeah, it was all over. You might as well say.

[B]

Yeah, there's no way of. There was. He just. Do you remember anything about how he came to the church in the first guy?

[I]

You know, I just remember there, and I don't. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how they got a hold of him or anything.

[B]

So he was really popular.

[I]

Yeah. Yeah, he was a nice fellow. Like I say, he'd be the first one at somebody's house with food, you know, or he was just a nice guy. That's all you make out of him. Nobody would ever thought this. That's what, you know, he would have done something like that.

[B]

In the winter of 1988, Charles and his wife Elizabeth fought. She wanted a divorce, and they both knew what that meant. He shouted at her, I won't lose another church. He was $150,000 in debt from failed business ventures. This on a preacher's salary. His behavior grew erratic. The walls began to close in. He had a secret he could not share. A marriage that was disintegrating demons he was desperately trying to keep at bay. He still goes to preach every Sunday, but no one knows the full story of his life. No one, that is, except the only person who would have mattered for Charles Sennett. And that was Go. One thing I don't understand is he seems completely ill suited for the ministry. He seems volatile. He's having an affair with a congregant. His finances are a mess. He's abusive to his wife. He's. I'm just curious, how does he. How would someone like that enter and survive in the ministry, particularly in a world where people are as conscious of conduct as the Church of Christ community is.

[I]

He worked very hard to make sure nobody knew, outside that tight circle of biological family.

[B]

I asked a Church of Christ minister named Rodney Plunkett about the case. He knew Charles Sennett.

[I]

That's not atypical. Yeah. They mask.

[B]

And the amount of effort that must have gone into masking that enormous.

[I]

Malcolm. It's absolutely enormous.

[B]

I asked my theologian friend Lee Camp the same question. One of the things I'm trying to understand is we have this man, Church of Christ minister Charles Sennett, in little town northwestern Alabama, who is having an affair, and his wife has decided to divorce him. And, you know, I'm wondering, were he a, you know, a Mennonite or were he a Muslim or whatever, all those. All those traditions would have. Would shape his.

[C]

Right.

[B]

His dysfunction in some way. And I'm curious, how does his. How does his tradition shape his dysfunction? That's what I'm trying to get at. What's going on inside his head as he processes the kind of his affair, his wife's decision, and the chaos of his own life. And he's. He's the pastor of this. This little white clapper church in a corner of Sheffield.

[C]

Yeah. I mean, who knows, right? But, you know, I would make up that the sense of shame is overwhelming. And when you're in a context of overwhelming shame, it can do terrifying things to the psyche. And in the absence of any sort of constructive grace. And I don't mean by that some flabby sense of, oh, everything's okay, you know, you know, grace. But some sort of constructive sense of grace, you know, it can quickly lead you to all sorts of madness.

[B]

Christian grace, God's unmerited favor and loving kindness, a gift freely given to humanity, unearned and undeserved, a spontaneous act of generosity on God's part, extended to all humanity, regardless of their sin. What Camp was saying and what many others in the Church of Christ came to believe was that their church, particularly their church in that era 40, 50 years ago, did not understand grace. Grant Aspel told me about his uncle, the song leader in a Church of Christ congregation, who once talked a little bit too much about grace and forgiveness at Sunday school and so was let go the Church elders wouldn't even let him finish out his contract because. Because if you had deciphered the rules of the Bible, the logic of the Christian text, then there shouldn't be any deviation, should there? It was all crystal clear. And if you started to grant forgiveness for those who strayed from that narrow path, then what incentive did people have to follow the narrow path? That was the thinking. And it's where the shame that Lee Camp was talking about came from. Because in the absence of grace, the. There is no relief from transgression. People like Asbell and Lee Camp have been trying to push their church in a more forgiving direction, to bring grace into their religious experience. But in the 1980s, in a small town in Alabama, this is what Asbell said.

[F]

The idea behind that is this idea that if you want to one day be judged faithful, you have to have kept these rules. And even to the point where if you break one of the rules, you can ask forgiveness. But the way that it felt as a kid was if you fell out of an airplane and you said a cuss word on the way down and you didn't have a chance to repent of that word before you hit the ground, then you might. Your soul might be lost to damnation for eternity.

[B]

When Lee Camp said, I have loved my church and I have hated my church, this was the part he hated. I think it's interesting that you said, you know, when we think, when we imagine what is going through the mind of someone whose marriage is in trouble, who is in love with another woman, one possible interpretation is that their motivation is genuine in the sense that they have fallen out of love with their wife and in love with someone else and see the possibility for a greater happiness and are willing to endure a certain amount of pain and heartbreak to get to that greater happiness. But that's not. I'm not imagining that's what it is. It's. He is in love with another woman and is consumed by. With shame over his predicament.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, there's. Certainly, so far as his church context would be concerned, there's no viable route to a greater happiness with the other woman because it's simply not going to be permitted unless you leave the community that you probably think is the community that you have to be a part of if you're not going to go to hell. I mean, it's that simple, really. Again, I don't want to speculate about what he's thinking, but I would conjecture, given all that we know, you know, that I know about that Experience, it would be plausible that something like that's.

[B]

Going on, you know, which is a. Which is a. He's in a terrifying. For him, a terrifying place.

[I]

Sure.

[C]

As I'm sure was his wife. There was this joke that said that it was easier to get forgiveness in the Church of Christ for murdering somebody than it was to be divorced.

[B]

There is a proverb that dates back to the. The Middle ages that I'm sure you've heard in one version or another. For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the message was lost. For want of a message, the battle was lost. For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost. All for the want of a nail. The proverb of a lost nail is what's called a failure cascade. One small misstep or, or mishap leads to a second bigger problem and a third, even bigger problem. And finally, at the end of the chain catastrophe, the northeastern blackout. In August of 2003, one of the biggest blackouts in history, was a failure cascade. A couple of trees on the Eastlake transmission line outside of Cleveland grew a little bit too tall, and the electrical line, at that precise moment, perhaps because of the summer heat, sagged a little bit more than usual and touched the trees. The contact caused a short. The short caused the power that used to run along that line to be rerouted along another line, which overloaded that line, causing an even bigger electrical surge to be rerouted to another line and on and on, leading to a series of failures that rippled across the entire northeastern grid, leaving 50 million people without electricity. For want of a chainsaw, the power was lost. The Alabama murders is about a classic failure cascade, only where the ever widening ripples were caused not by mechanical or institutional defects, but failures of character, of justice, of compassion. Coming up on the Alabama Murders, that.

[H]

The viciousness was there, that he could do something like that, I don't know.

[B]

I answered the call and I got all the information on who done it.

[I]

Who was all involved and all the particulars.

[G]

He was having an affair with a parishioner. There weren't 70 people that went to that church. How did they not know that this was going on?

[I]

I don't know which one of them killed her, I really don't. But I think both of them got what they probably deserved, legally and morally. And at the time, we had had an execution in Alabama in a very long time.

[B]

And I said, sure.

[I]

Well, you know, I didn't know what I was getting into.

[B]

What is taught, either in nursing school or as an EMT or as a doctor cannot be lifted into the death chamber like it's not the same place.

[D]

He would say to himself, turn to the right, to the victim's family and apologize. Turn to the left. Tell my family I love him. So he had this little practice. To the right. I'm sorry. To the left. I love you.

[B]

Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Ben Nadaff Haffrey and Nina Byrd Lawrence. Additional reporting by Ben Nadaff Haffrey and Lee Hedgebeth. Our editor is Karen Shakerjee. Fact checking by Kate Furby. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Production support from Luke Clemond. Engineering by Nina Byrd Lawrence. Original scoring by Luis Guerra with Paul Brainard and Jimmy Bod. Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

[E]

SA.