Pod Insights Revisionist History The Alabama Murders - Part 1: The True Church About this episode In a small town in the northwest corner of Alabama, a cascade begins with a man and an affair.
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0:00 Speaker 00 This is Jacob Goldstein. When you're a business owner interested in expanding to new markets, there's a lot to consider and countless questions to answer before making the call. The most important one being, are you ready? That's where ChatGPT comes in. Give it a goal, add your files, and ask chat to help you map out different scenarios for the future of your business. So when growth is on the table, you've got an expansion plan ready to implement. Get started today at ChatGPT.com.
0:28 Malcolm Gladwell? This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending. We pay the bills and move on, and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly. You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it. That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over the limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet,
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1:54 Malcolm Gladwell? Terms and more at applecard.com. For I don't know how long, maybe 12, 13 years, I've worn a whoop band on my wrist. I started doing it because I met the founder of Whoop at a conference. He heard that I was a runner and he said, oh, you'll love this. It's perfect for athletes. And he was right. I've worn one ever since. Every time I work out, I see how hard I worked, how long I need to recover. I wake up in the morning and I get a complete picture of how my sleep went, which helps me understand the kinds of things that lead to a bad night and the kinds of things that lead to a good night. It's sleek, long-lasting battery. And now with AI looking at all my numbers and coaching me. Whoop is a winner.
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2:51 Malcolm Gladwell? Pushkin.
2:54 Malcolm Gladwell? Hello, 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 Plus. Sign up on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus. Pushkin Plus 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.
3:38 Malcolm Gladwell? I just want to understand how you ended up where you are.
3:44 Speaker 02 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 kind of what you're thinking?
3:56 Malcolm Gladwell? Yeah.
3:58 Malcolm Gladwell? 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.
4:16 Speaker 02 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."
5:02 Speaker 02 I also, though, I want to know what happened.
5:08 Malcolm Gladwell? 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.
5:22 Malcolm Gladwell? 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?
5:51 Speaker 02 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.
6:02 Malcolm Gladwell? Welcome to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is a special seven-episode series, "The Alabama Murders."
6:16 Malcolm Gladwell? Episode one, "The True Church."
6:28 Malcolm Gladwell? So we're now in, are we in Florence here?
6:30 Speaker 03 Yes.
6:32 Malcolm Gladwell? 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, Muscle 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.
7:15 Speaker 03 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.
7:25 Malcolm Gladwell? I started going to Alabama after talking to Kate Porterfield. And on one of my first trips, I met a man named Grant Asbault, a preacher, early 40s, big beard, baseball cap, though not on Sunday morning, of course. He was my guide to Florence.
7:40 Speaker 03 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 come to Florence.
7:50 Malcolm Gladwell? 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.
7:59 Speaker 03 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...
8:20 Speaker 03 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 Sennett 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."
9:12 Speaker 00 This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com. This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending.
9:57 Speaker 00 We pay the bills and move on and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly. You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it.
10:12 Malcolm Gladwell? That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over the limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet, if I do, my daily cash can grow automatically over time without any extra effort. When you better understand your spending habits, it's easier to make your money work harder for you. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval, variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.74% to 27.99% based on credit worthiness.
10:56 Malcolm Gladwell? Rates as of October 1, 2026. Existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or card.apple.com. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Member FDIC. Terms and more at applecard.com. This is Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History. In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition.
11:37 Malcolm Gladwell? Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military. 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 an early 1980s Church of Christ congregation, how long would it take you before you knew you were in Church of Christ?
12:20 Speaker 04 I would know in about three minutes or less.
12:25 Malcolm Gladwell? This is Lee Kemp, 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?
12:38 Speaker 04 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 you are.
12:56 Malcolm Gladwell? Like what?
12:56 Speaker 04 And the prayers are going to say, Lord, guard, guide, and direct us. I don't know, there'd just be language like that, that I would immediately know.
13:04 Malcolm Gladwell? By the way, for those of you who know something about country music, what do Waylon Jennings, Roy Orbison, Loretta Lynn, Glenn Campbell, Dwight Yoakam, Pat Boone, Crystal Gayle, I could go on, all have in common? They all came out of the a cappella 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?
13:32 Malcolm Gladwell? You look around, what do you see that's a tip off? No organ.
13:37 Speaker 04 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 for the cross, there's pews, and there are, there's on the one side at the front is going to be a board that shows attendance, contribution numbers. On the other side's going to be a board that has the hymn numbers that you slide in with the numbers. And in the middle's going to be a simple pulpit.
14:12 Malcolm Gladwell? 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 Asbault, 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.
14:52 Malcolm Gladwell? Now, you're from Alabama.
14:53 Speaker 04 I am from Alabama.
14:54 Malcolm Gladwell? You were born in?
14:55 Speaker 04 Talladega.
14:56 Malcolm Gladwell? Talladega. And?
14:58 Speaker 04 It's not Talladega, or Talladiga, it's Talladiga.
15:02 Malcolm Gladwell? Talladiga. And you grew up in the Church of Christ?
15:06 Speaker 04 I did.
15:07 Malcolm Gladwell? When you say that you are, uh, 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"?
15:19 Speaker 04 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.
15:44 Speaker 04 That's not a denomination, that's not Protestant, it's not Catholic, it's just the true church.
15:50 Malcolm Gladwell? 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.
16:15 Malcolm Gladwell? 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.
16:56 Speaker 04 Like, I love and hate Church of Christ. You know, I love them, and I have hated them.
17:10 Speaker 04 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.
17:29 Speaker 04 And yet, at the same time, 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
17:48 Speaker 04 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, the church would practice this sort of, on occasion, would practice this sort of disfellowshipping, we called it, where you could literally be socially estranged, socially disciplined publicly.
18:11 Speaker 04 And then, apart from some sort of public statement of repentance, you couldn't be a member of good standing in the church.
18:21 Malcolm Gladwell? You cannot divorce your wife unless there is a documented case of adultery, full stop. Women cannot participate in a church service, full stop. Singing must be a cappella. Instruments are a frivolity.
18:35 Speaker 04 You've got, you know, all these taboos around no dancing, because if you dance, you're gonna lust, and if you lust, you're gonna go to hell. You know, no mixed bathing, we called it, which means you're not swimming around people of the opposite sex, because if you do, you're gonna lust and you'll go to hell.
18:52 Speaker 04 And 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, you know. 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."
19:32 Malcolm Gladwell? This is the world Charles Sennett, the man at the center of our story, belonged to. He was born in West Virginia. His father was a Church of Christ preacher. He got married to Elizabeth Dorlene 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.
19:57 Speaker 05 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, they'll go out and have a date night."
20:07 Malcolm Gladwell? This is Susan Mosley, a nurse at a local weight loss clinic who became close with Elizabeth.
20:13 Speaker 05 You know, brought them babies with her a lot of times. And I made a little thing in there, in that little exercise room, a little cable chair, we're coloring books so they could sit there and follow the lines, she was there.
20:24 Malcolm Gladwell? 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.
21:06 Malcolm Gladwell? Because there was 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. Sennett 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.
21:51 Malcolm Gladwell? "Examen 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."
22:12 Malcolm Gladwell? 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.
22:27 Speaker 06 A lot of this that I know was hearsay amongst us all.
22:30 Malcolm Gladwell? Yeah.
22:30 Speaker 06 You know how it passes from person to person, gets bigger or gets smaller, so...
22:35 Malcolm Gladwell? Yeah.
22:36 Speaker 06 Take everything I tell you with a grain of salt, because it was all hearsay.
22:40 Malcolm Gladwell? This is Shirley Bill and her son Eric. They were members of Charles sentance church. And was he, was he a good preacher?
22:50 Speaker 07 Evidently, he must have been a...
22:53 Speaker 06 Charismatic.
22:53 Speaker 07 Yes, I would say.
22:54 Speaker 06 Very charismatic.
22:56 Malcolm Gladwell? Yeah, yeah. The...
22:59 Speaker 06 To the point my mother called him a ladies' man.
23:01 Malcolm Gladwell? Oh, really? Oh, your mother had a, she had a, uh, did she mean that in...
23:06 Speaker 06 Mother had a way of labeling people.
23:11 Malcolm Gladwell? Did she, did she mean that in a positive way or a negative way?
23:15 Speaker 07 If my grandmother said it, it was negative.
23:20 Speaker 07 She was very conservative and very, uh, yeah. Yeah, see, that would have been a very, a very negative thing to say about somebody.
23:27 Speaker 06 My back would say it's about as pure Church of Christ as you can get.
23:33 Malcolm Gladwell? There were whispers about a woman in the West Side congregation, Doris.
23:37 Speaker 07 We heard the, you know, the connected rumors that she was involved.
23:45 Speaker 07 Her husband was having some serious issues. I don't know. I...
23:51 Speaker 07 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, wasn't it?
24:00 Speaker 06 Yeah, I think so at the time. That's my understanding. I don't know therefore.
24:04 Speaker 07 I would almost say she was probably seeking some counseling from him.
24:08 Malcolm Gladwell? Charles Sennett was in love with a woman who is not his wife. He had a book of poems in his office called Memories of the Heart with Doris's picture in it. There were rumors, someone saw Valentine Charles had given Doris. I talked with another former member of the West Side Church, Carl Roden. We sat in his living room. He had a dog on his lap. I'm just curious, was he a good?
24:32 Speaker 05 He was a nice fellow you wouldn't be around.
24:37 Malcolm Gladwell? He was what?
24:37 Speaker 05 Nice.
24:38 Malcolm Gladwell? Yeah.
24:39 Speaker 05 I mean, you just couldn't hardly beat him. Somebody'd 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, you know.
24:50 Malcolm Gladwell? Was he a good preacher?
24:51 Speaker 05 Yeah. That's why I say he had a split personality, best I can tell.
24:55 Malcolm Gladwell? 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, same thing, having an affair with someone in the church.
25:13 Speaker 05 Let's see, they should have told us when they fired him, but then nobody sent him back to him.
25:19 Malcolm Gladwell? Yeah.
25:19 Speaker 05 It was all over, you might as well say.
25:22 Malcolm Gladwell? Yeah. There was no way of, there was, he just, do you remember anything about how he came to the church in the first place? You don't?
25:29 Speaker 05 I just remember there and I don't, I don't know. I don't know if they got a hold of him or anything.
25:36 Malcolm Gladwell? So he was really popular?
25:38 Speaker 05 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.
25:49 Malcolm Gladwell? Nobody would have never thought that he would have done something like that. 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.
26:30 Malcolm Gladwell? No one, that is, except the only person who would have mattered for Charles Sennett, and that was God.
26:49 Speaker 00 This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com.
27:26 Malcolm Gladwell? This is Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History. In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military.
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28:29 Malcolm Gladwell? 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?
29:02 Speaker 03 He worked very hard to make sure nobody knew outside that tight circle of biological family.
29:07 Malcolm Gladwell? I asked the Church of Christ minister named Rodney Plunkett about the case. He knew Charles Sennett.
29:13 Speaker 03 That's not atypical. That, yeah, he, they mask.
29:18 Malcolm Gladwell? And the amount of effort that must have gone into masking that.
29:24 Speaker 03 Enormous, Malcolm, it's absolutely enormous.
29:28 Malcolm Gladwell? I asked my theologian friend, Lee Kemp, 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,
30:05 Speaker 04 Right.
30:06 Malcolm Gladwell? 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?
30:19 Malcolm Gladwell? His affair, his wife's decision, and the chaos of his own life. And he's the pastor of this little white Clapper church in a corner of Sheffield.
30:32 Speaker 04 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, grace, but some sort of constructive sense of grace, you know, it can quickly lead you to all sorts of madness.
31:19 Malcolm Gladwell? 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 Kemp 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. Grand 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 if you had deciphered the rules of the Bible,
32:04 Malcolm Gladwell? 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 thinking. And it's where the shame that Lee Kemp was talking about came from. Because in the absence of grace, there is no relief from transgression. People like Aspel and Lee Kemp 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 Aspel said.
32:45 Speaker 03 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.
33:23 Malcolm Gladwell? When Lee Kemp said, "I have loved my church and I have hated my church," this was the part he hated.
33:32 Malcolm Gladwell? I mean, 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.
34:10 Malcolm Gladwell? It's he is in love with another woman and is consumed with shame over his predicament.
34:18 Speaker 04 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, that there's, it would be plausible that something like that's going on.
34:53 Malcolm Gladwell? Hmm.
34:54 Speaker 04 You know?
34:55 Malcolm Gladwell? Which is a... Which is a... He's in a terrifying, for him, a terrifying place.
35:04 Speaker 04 Sure. 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.
35:28 Malcolm Gladwell? There is a proverb that dates back to 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 mishap leads to a second, bigger problem, and a third, even bigger problem, and finally, at the end of the chain, catastrophe.
36:08 Malcolm Gladwell? 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.
36:53 Malcolm Gladwell? For want of a chainsaw, the power was lost.
37:02 Malcolm Gladwell? 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.
37:36 Malcolm Gladwell? Coming up on The Alabama Murders.
37:39 Speaker 06 That the viciousness was there that he could do something like that, I don't know.
37:43 Malcolm Gladwell? I answered the call and I got all the information on who done it, who was all involved, and all the particulars.
37:52 Speaker 05 He was having an affair with a parishioner.
37:56 Speaker 05 There weren't 70 people that went to that church. How did they not know that this was going on?
38:04 Speaker 03 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 a very long time. And I said, sure, well, you know, I didn't know what I was getting into. What is taught either in nursing school, or as an EMT, or as a doctor,
38:27 Speaker 02 cannot be lifted into the death chamber. Like, it's not the same place. 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 them. So he would have this little practice, to the right, I'm sorry, to the left, I love you.
38:52 Malcolm Gladwell? Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Ben Daf Hafry, and Nina Bird Lawrence. Additional reporting by Ben Daf Hafry and Lee Hedgesbeth. Our editor is Karen Shikurji. Fact checking by Kate Furby. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Production support from Luke Lamond. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Original scoring by Luis Guerra with Paul Brainard and Jimmy Bott. Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski.
39:22 Malcolm Gladwell? I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
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