From Revisionist History: The Alabama Murders

October 30, 2025·33 min·2 clips

A Church of Christ member describes how the church's rules around shame and disfellowshipping damaged people, including himself.

The episode opens with psychologist Kate Porterfield describing her visits with a death row inmate named Kenny in the aftermath of a botched execution. Kenny spent the first two hours of their session discussing the love he received from his family during his goodbye, not the execution itself, which Porterfield found both clinically striking and emotionally powerful. Gladwell introduces the series as an investigation into why this death row case went on so long, took so many bizarre turns, and why systems meant to address suffering so often amplify it instead. The story is set in the Shoals, a cluster of four towns in northwestern Alabama — Sheffield, Tuscumbia, Muscle Shoals, and Florence — a relatively isolated area described as a closed society. Gladwell meets local guide Grant Asbell, a preacher in his 40s, who helps orient him to Florence, noting you have to want to come there. The episode establishes that the Church of Christ denomination is the spiritual centre of the Shoals, with numerous congregations within an hour's drive of Florence. Theologian Lee Camp from Lipscomb University explains that a Church of Christ service is identifiable within three minutes by its a cappella singing, plain architecture, lack of instruments, and specific prayer language. The episode notes that Waylon Jennings, Roy Orbison, Loretta Lynn, and several other country musicians emerged from this tradition. A source explains that Church of Christ members believe they alone have restored New Testament Christianity and that all other denominations are wrong, making it not a denomination in their own view but the true church. The denomination is characterised as educated, rule-bound, and certain, with high levels of advanced degrees among leadership and a theology that holds anyone can discern salvation by careful Bible reading. The episode then introduces Charles Sennett, a Church of Christ preacher born in West Virginia who tripled the size of a congregation in Jasper, Alabama before being fired for an affair with a congregant. He suffered a breakdown, was hospitalised in a psychiatric facility in Birmingham, and eventually relocated to the Shoals to preach at the smaller Westside Church of Christ in Sheffield. Sources describe him as charismatic, kind, and pastoral, someone who would be the first to arrive with food when a congregant was ill, yet with a split personality underneath. In the Shoals, Sennett fell in love with a congregant named Doris, leaving behind a book of poems dedicated to her in his office. By the winter of 1988, his wife Elizabeth wanted a divorce and Sennett told her he would not lose another church. He was $150,000 in debt. Theologian Lee Camp and others explain that the Church of Christ's rigid rules and absence of grace meant Sennett had no acceptable route out of his situation — divorce was essentially forbidden, and shame from transgression had no relief. Gladwell frames the entire series through the concept of a failure cascade, borrowing the medieval proverb about a lost nail and illustrating it with the 2003 northeastern blackout, arguing the Alabama murders represent a cascade of failures in character, justice, and compassion.

As heard by us

A murder case opens onto belief, control, and the costs of belonging.

It is less interested in shock than in the pressure around Charles Sennett's world. The story starts with repeated conversations between a psychologist and a man on death row, then opens into Church of Christ rules, public discipline, and the fear of not toeing the line.

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Why you'd press play

When you want a case that widens into a study of church discipline and social control.

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