Latest / Revisionist History / The Alabama Murders - Part 1: The True Church

Transcript

The Alabama Murders - Part 1: The True Church · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin Hello, hello Malcolm.
0:19
Speaker 2: Here.
0:19
Speaker 1: Before we get to the episode, I want to let
0:22
Speaker 1: you know you can get this entire season now ad
0:25
Speaker 1: free by subscribing to Revisionist History on Pushkin Plus, sign
0:30
Speaker 1: up on the show page on Apple Podcasts, or at
0:32
Speaker 1: pushkin dot fm, slash Plus. Pushkin Plus subscribers can access
0:38
Speaker 1: ad free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content
0:44
Speaker 1: for all Pushkin shows. A little while ago, a friend
0:48
Speaker 1: of mine told me, you have to meet this person
0:50
Speaker 1: I know, Cape Porterfield. She's got the strangest job in America.
0:56
Speaker 1: So I did. We got together Porterfield and I in
0:59
Speaker 1: a little conference room in Manhattan. I just want to
1:02
Speaker 1: understand how you ended up where you are.
1:08
Speaker 3: So you're kind of viewing us. We're just talking. You're
1:11
Speaker 3: thinking about whether there's something here that will that'll evolve
1:15
Speaker 3: over time that you would imagine being putting in the podcast.
1:19
Speaker 4: Was that kind of everything?
1:19
Speaker 1: Yeah?
1:20
Speaker 5: Yeah.
1:22
Speaker 1: Porterfield is a psychologist. We talked for a few hours,
1:25
Speaker 1: then again and again, one conversation leading to another, until
1:30
Speaker 1: she began to talk about a case that had affected
1:32
Speaker 1: her deeply. Although she hasn't used the word case, she
1:36
Speaker 1: says person a man on death row.
1:40
Speaker 3: When I first went to see Kenny, so now it
1:43
Speaker 3: had been two months since the execution attempt. He wanted
1:47
Speaker 3: to talk for the first probably two hours of our
1:50
Speaker 3: visit about how beautiful his goodbyes were and the love
1:56
Speaker 3: he received from his family as he was going into
1:58
Speaker 3: the execution. That's what he wanted to start with. And
2:02
Speaker 3: I found this so powerful and also fascinating, honestly as
2:06
Speaker 3: a clinician, because what I first thought was, Oh, he's avoiding, right,
2:12
Speaker 3: he can't talk about the execution. He talked to me
2:15
Speaker 3: about love for probably two two and a half hours,
2:18
Speaker 3: to the point where I had to say, you know,
2:20
Speaker 3: this is incredible and I'm so happy you're sharing it,
2:23
Speaker 3: and I'm not surprised. I also though, I want to
2:26
Speaker 3: know what happened.
2:32
Speaker 1: What happened was a botched execution punishment for a crime
2:36
Speaker 1: that took place over thirty years before, a river of
2:40
Speaker 1: blood that had already claimed the lives of three others.
2:45
Speaker 1: Kate Porderfield told me her version of events. Then I
2:48
Speaker 1: went out and got other people's versions of what happened,
2:51
Speaker 1: and that's where the story I'm about to tell you
2:53
Speaker 1: comes from. I want to figure out why this case
2:57
Speaker 1: went on for as long as it did, why it
2:59
Speaker 1: took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way,
3:03
Speaker 1: And the other question, maybe the more important question, is
3:07
Speaker 1: why have we quitted a system that, in trying to
3:10
Speaker 1: respond to suffering all too often makes suffering worse.
3:15
Speaker 3: He made me really pause and think a lot, watching
3:18
Speaker 3: someone only start from a place of love after something
3:21
Speaker 3: so horrible was I have never seen that before.
3:26
Speaker 1: Welcome to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
3:31
Speaker 1: This is a special seven episode series, The Alabama Murders,
3:40
Speaker 1: Episode one, The True Church. So we're now in Are
3:53
Speaker 1: we in Florence here?
3:54
Speaker 6: Yes?
3:55
Speaker 1: This story takes place in northwestern Alabama, in an area
3:59
Speaker 1: called the Shoals, the so called Alabama black Belt, the
4:03
Speaker 1: broad flat swath of fertile farmland where the old Antebellum
4:06
Speaker 1: cotton plantations were established. Hours drive to the south. This
4:11
Speaker 1: is Rolling Hills, Appalachia, not the Mississippi Delta. Four towns
4:16
Speaker 1: on either side of the Tennessee River, Sheffield, Discumbia, Mussel Shoals,
4:20
Speaker 1: and Florence. Sheffield is working class, struggling Muscle Shoals is
4:25
Speaker 1: a spiritual home of rhythm and blues. Discumbia is famous
4:29
Speaker 1: for being the birthplace of Helen Keller. Florence is the largest,
4:34
Speaker 1: a graceful town of beautiful pre war buildings with a
4:37
Speaker 1: Frank Lloyd Wrighthouse downtown.
4:39
Speaker 6: You know, there's no interstate that runs through Florence, there's
4:42
Speaker 6: no major airport, so it's a little bit of a
4:45
Speaker 6: closed society almost.
4:47
Speaker 7: It's really neat.
4:49
Speaker 1: I started going to Alabama after talking to Cape Porterfield,
4:52
Speaker 1: and on one of my first trips, I met a
4:54
Speaker 1: man named Grant Asbell, a preacher early forties, big beard
4:59
Speaker 1: baseball cap, though not on Sunday morning. Of course. He
5:02
Speaker 1: was my guide to Florence.
5:04
Speaker 6: You know, there's good music, there's good art, there's good food,
5:07
Speaker 6: but you just don't happen here. You have to want
5:10
Speaker 6: to come to Florence.
5:14
Speaker 1: This is the place where it all started with a
5:16
Speaker 1: personal transgression, a matter of the heart, by another preacher,
5:20
Speaker 1: a man named Charles Sennate.
5:23
Speaker 6: I was only seven years old when it happened, but
5:26
Speaker 6: I remember it being really disconcerting because if you're in
5:31
Speaker 6: this group and like it in this area in particular,
5:34
Speaker 6: I mean, you've been to Florence, Florence, you don't get
5:37
Speaker 6: here by accident, and so the idea that someone within
5:42
Speaker 6: this framework could do something like Charles Sennett did was
5:47
Speaker 6: very disruptive. It was talked about kind of in hush tones.
5:50
Speaker 6: I was talking to our local he goes to church
5:52
Speaker 6: with us here. He's actually the historian for the city
5:55
Speaker 6: of Florence, and he was telling me that one of
5:59
Speaker 6: the preachers in one of the churches in town. While
6:02
Speaker 6: that was going on, got up in the poolpit and said,
6:05
Speaker 6: Charles Sennett is a faithful Christian brother. The things that
6:09
Speaker 6: are being said about him are lies with the idea right.
6:13
Speaker 6: He is a faithful Church of Christ member and almost
6:17
Speaker 6: incapable of this kind of thing.
6:38
Speaker 1: In Alabama, the Shoals is the spiritual center of the
6:41
Speaker 1: Protestant denomination known as the Church of Christ. There are
6:45
Speaker 1: many many Church of Christ congregations within an hour's drive
6:48
Speaker 1: of Florence. And I don't think that any of the
6:51
Speaker 1: things we're going to explore over the course of this
6:53
Speaker 1: series will make sense unless you first understand something about
6:57
Speaker 1: this denomination. If I blindfolded you and put you in
7:01
Speaker 1: an early nineteen eighties Church of Christ congregation, how long
7:04
Speaker 1: would it take you before you knew you were in
7:06
Speaker 1: Church of Christ.
7:09
Speaker 5: I would know in about three minutes or less.
7:12
Speaker 1: This is Lee camp who has taught theology for years
7:15
Speaker 1: at Lipscomb University in Nashville, one of the most prestigious
7:19
Speaker 1: of the many universities around the United States affiliated with
7:21
Speaker 1: the Church of Christ. Would what would be the tip off?
7:26
Speaker 5: Well, the singing would be acappella is the first thing,
7:29
Speaker 5: and so you know, the only place you're going to
7:31
Speaker 5: find a cocapel singing is probably either going to be
7:33
Speaker 5: Mennonites or Church of Christ. It may be Church of
7:35
Speaker 5: the Brethren. And then there are going to be certain
7:38
Speaker 5: phrases that are going to get said that would just
7:42
Speaker 5: be a tip off that you know, this is what
7:44
Speaker 5: in the prayers are going to say, Lord, guard, guide
7:47
Speaker 5: and direct us. I don't know, there just be language
7:49
Speaker 5: like that that I would immediately know.
7:52
Speaker 1: By the way, for those of you who know something
7:54
Speaker 1: about country music, what do willn Jennings, Roy Orbison, Loeurete Olinn,
8:00
Speaker 1: Glenn Campbell, Dwight Yoakam, Pat Boon, Crystal Gale, I could
8:04
Speaker 1: go on, all have in common. They all came out
8:07
Speaker 1: of the a cappella tradition of the Church of Christ.
8:10
Speaker 1: It's not Sunday morning. I just take you to a church.
8:13
Speaker 1: It's empty. How long does it take you to know
8:15
Speaker 1: that you're in a Church of Christ. There's no one
8:17
Speaker 1: in there. You look around, what do you see? That's
8:22
Speaker 1: a tip of no organ?
8:25
Speaker 5: There's no organ, and just the whole architecture is very,
8:28
Speaker 5: very simple. There's lack of pretense. There's certainly no art
8:37
Speaker 5: on the walls. There's no stations for the cross. There's
8:41
Speaker 5: pews and there are there's on the one side at
8:45
Speaker 5: the front is going to be a board that shows
8:49
Speaker 5: attendance contribution numbers. On the other side, it's going to
8:52
Speaker 5: be a board that has the hymn numbers that you
8:54
Speaker 5: slide in with the numbers. And in the middle it's
8:57
Speaker 5: going to be a simple poolpit.
9:00
Speaker 1: I know about the Church of Christ because my best
9:03
Speaker 1: friend is the screenwriter Charles Randolph, whose father Dale was
9:08
Speaker 1: a Church of Christ, who went to Lipscomb. And once
9:11
Speaker 1: when I was visiting Lipscomb, the same school where Lee
9:14
Speaker 1: Camp teaches, a little old lady came out to me
9:16
Speaker 1: and said, are you Dale Randolph's famous son Chuck's friend. Yes,
9:22
Speaker 1: I am. And while I'm playing this game, I should
9:25
Speaker 1: point out that halfway through my conversation with Grant asboll
9:28
Speaker 1: I discovered that he did his doctorate at Lipscomb with
9:32
Speaker 1: Lee Camp. The point is that the Church of Christ
9:36
Speaker 1: is a very small world. It's a family.
9:40
Speaker 5: Now, you're from Alabama, I am from Alabama. You were
9:42
Speaker 5: born in Talladega, Telladega and not Talladega or Talladega, it's
9:48
Speaker 5: Taladia Telladigga.
9:51
Speaker 1: And you grew up in the Church of Christ.
9:54
Speaker 5: I did.
9:55
Speaker 1: When you say that you are that you belong to
9:59
Speaker 1: the Church of Christ, what are you saying about? What
10:02
Speaker 1: does that mean? How's that different from I'm a Baptist.
10:07
Speaker 5: Well, it depends on who you're talking to and where
10:10
Speaker 5: they are in their experience of Churches of Christ. But
10:15
Speaker 5: when someone says I'm a member of the Church of Christ,
10:18
Speaker 5: that means that they are members of the true Church
10:23
Speaker 5: that restored New Testament Christianity, and everybody else is wrong,
10:28
Speaker 5: and that this is the true Church. That's not a denomination,
10:34
Speaker 5: that's not Protestant, it's not Catholic, it's just the true Church.
10:38
Speaker 1: In the taxonomy of Southern Protestantism, there are the Pentecostals,
10:42
Speaker 1: the singing, the swaying, speaking in tongues emotion. The Church
10:46
Speaker 1: of Christ isn't that. Then there are the fundamentalists, the
10:50
Speaker 1: Southern Baptists, fire and Brimstone. The Church of Christ isn't
10:53
Speaker 1: that either. The Baptists and the Pentecostals can sometimes go
10:57
Speaker 1: on all Sunday afternoon. In a Church of Christ, You're
11:01
Speaker 1: out in an hour. These are the people of the book.
11:05
Speaker 1: There is said to be more advanced degrees in the
11:07
Speaker 1: Church of Christ's leadership than any of the Southern denominations.
11:11
Speaker 1: There are a church of rules and certainties, simplicity and clarity,
11:16
Speaker 1: a church inspired by the idea that anyone who studies
11:19
Speaker 1: the Bible, reads it closely and thoughtfully, can discern the
11:23
Speaker 1: path to salvation. That's the good part, the beautiful part.
11:28
Speaker 1: But the other part, and by the way, no one
11:30
Speaker 1: is more willing to acknowledge the limitations of the Church
11:33
Speaker 1: of Christ than people who belong to the Church of Christ,
11:36
Speaker 1: is that the rules, the certainty, the intimacy can become
11:40
Speaker 1: a straight jacket.
11:44
Speaker 5: Like I love and hate Church to Christ. You know
11:48
Speaker 5: I love them and I have hated them, and you
11:58
Speaker 5: know I love them because I've spent my life doing
12:03
Speaker 5: what I've done with my life because of what I
12:05
Speaker 5: learned in my church. You know, I was loved by
12:07
Speaker 5: my church, loved by the people in that church. And
12:17
Speaker 5: yet at the same time that the traditions in the
12:21
Speaker 5: latter part of the twentieth century have done a lot
12:23
Speaker 5: of damage to a lot of people, including me. There's
12:26
Speaker 5: a sense of fear, and there's there's always the danger
12:31
Speaker 5: that you'll be kind of cut off, and so that
12:38
Speaker 5: it was kind of fear of just saying you're not okay,
12:41
Speaker 5: you know, you don't toe the line. And so the church,
12:43
Speaker 5: the church would practice this sort of on occasion, would
12:46
Speaker 5: practice is sort of just fellowshipping, we called it, where
12:50
Speaker 5: you could literally be socially you know, estranged, socially disciplined publicly,
12:59
Speaker 5: and then apart from some sort of public statement of repentance,
13:04
Speaker 5: you could be a member of good standing in the church.
13:09
Speaker 1: You cannot divorce your wife unless there is a documented
13:12
Speaker 1: case of adultery. Full stop. Women cannot participate in a
13:16
Speaker 1: church service. Full stop. Singing must be a cappella. Instruments
13:21
Speaker 1: are a frivolity.
13:22
Speaker 5: You've got, you know, all these taboos around no dancing,
13:27
Speaker 5: because if you dance you're gonna lust, and if you lest,
13:29
Speaker 5: you're going to go to hell. You know, no mixed
13:31
Speaker 5: bathing we called it, which means you're not swimming around
13:34
Speaker 5: in people of opposite sex, because if you do, you're
13:36
Speaker 5: gonna ust and you'll go to hell. And one of
13:40
Speaker 5: my favorite stories about kind of illustrating this was that
13:44
Speaker 5: we were on a youth group trip and in another
13:48
Speaker 5: town and we were pulling out of the church to
13:52
Speaker 5: go to launch break and the preacher driving the van
13:57
Speaker 5: van full of you know, impressionable fourteen fifteen year olds,
14:01
Speaker 5: he looks to the left and there's this guy jogging
14:03
Speaker 5: down the sidewalk and his jogging shorts. And we were
14:07
Speaker 5: not permitted to wear shorts in public because of the
14:10
Speaker 5: last thing, you know, And this guy's jogging down the
14:12
Speaker 5: sidewalk and the preacher looks at him and he says,
14:14
Speaker 5: he looks real nice in those jigging shorts. He'll look
14:17
Speaker 5: real nice in hell.
14:19
Speaker 1: This is the world. Charles Sennett, the men at the
14:22
Speaker 1: center of our story belonged to He was born in
14:25
Speaker 1: West Virginia. His father was a Church of Christ preacher.
14:28
Speaker 1: He got married to Elizabeth do Lean in nineteen sixty
14:31
Speaker 1: two She was the picture of a preacher's wife. They
14:34
Speaker 1: had two sons together, and by the time she was
14:37
Speaker 1: in her early forties, Elizabeth was already a grandmother. There
14:41
Speaker 1: are still lots of people in the Shoals who remember
14:43
Speaker 1: the sentence she.
14:45
Speaker 4: Was a chippable low my grandbaby.
14:48
Speaker 8: Let me run home mate, chocolate chip bookies and keep
14:50
Speaker 8: them over weekend with their family.
14:52
Speaker 4: Their parents gonna go out have a day.
14:54
Speaker 8: Not.
14:55
Speaker 1: This is Susan Moseley, a nurse at a local weight
14:58
Speaker 1: loss clinic who became close with Elizabeth, you.
15:01
Speaker 8: Know, brought them babies with her a lot of times,
15:04
Speaker 8: and they and I'm a little thing in there in
15:06
Speaker 8: that little exercise running, little cabin chair, color and books.
15:09
Speaker 1: So leg I said, there and fell the Bacchus with Charles.
15:12
Speaker 1: Got a doctorate in divinity in the nineteen seventies, became
15:16
Speaker 1: the preacher at a Church of Christ in Jasper, Alabama,
15:19
Speaker 1: a small town two hours south of the Shoals. He
15:22
Speaker 1: was good. In a few years he tripled the size
15:25
Speaker 1: of the church. He was handsome, dynamic, a wonderful singing
15:28
Speaker 1: voice in the best Church of Christ tradition. At some
15:33
Speaker 1: point in his thirties, at the point his career seemed ascendant,
15:37
Speaker 1: things began to go sideways for Charles Sennett. There were
15:41
Speaker 1: rumors of some indiscretion at the Church of Christ in Jasper,
15:44
Speaker 1: an affair. The elders fired him. If you want to
15:48
Speaker 1: trace the precise moment at which things began to unravel,
15:52
Speaker 1: perhaps it was here, because there was a version of
15:55
Speaker 1: events in which he could have stayed in Jasper for
15:57
Speaker 1: his whole career built upon his success there. To be
16:01
Speaker 1: a minister at a successful Church of Christ is a
16:03
Speaker 1: position of real status. There's a kind of free market
16:07
Speaker 1: in that world. When there's a hot young pature in town,
16:10
Speaker 1: people will leave their churches and join the rising star.
16:14
Speaker 1: Senate was that rising star. But then he lost it all.
16:18
Speaker 1: He was despondent. His family came upon him one night,
16:22
Speaker 1: curl up in a ball on the couch. He'd had
16:25
Speaker 1: a nervous breakdown. He became suicidal. He ended up spending
16:29
Speaker 1: weeks in a psychiatric hospital in Birmingham. This is the
16:33
Speaker 1: summary from the medical records of the psychiatric facility where
16:36
Speaker 1: he was hospitalized. Exam reveals an unkempt, hostile, rebellious white male.
16:43
Speaker 1: His thought content is preoccupied, his psychomotor agitated and his
16:48
Speaker 1: affect labile. His mood is depressed, his sensorium confused and
16:53
Speaker 1: his tension level tense. His insight is lacking, and his
16:57
Speaker 1: judgment is poor. He found another job, then another, moved
17:03
Speaker 1: to the Shoals and became the preacher at the West
17:05
Speaker 1: Side Church of Christ in Sheffield, small working class congress gation,
17:09
Speaker 1: little white church, not jasper, a step down starting over.
17:15
Speaker 4: A lot of this that I know was hearsay amongst Usaul.
17:18
Speaker 8: Yeah, you know how it passes from person to person,
17:20
Speaker 8: gets bigger or gets smaller. So yeah, take everything. I
17:25
Speaker 8: tell you what the grain of salt, because it was
17:27
Speaker 8: all your day.
17:28
Speaker 1: This is Charlie Bill and her son Eric. They were
17:31
Speaker 1: members of Charles Sennen's church. And was he Was he
17:34
Speaker 1: a good preacher?
17:37
Speaker 9: Evidently he must have been.
17:41
Speaker 4: Charismatic, Yes, I would say, very charismatic.
17:44
Speaker 7: Yeah.
17:45
Speaker 8: Yeah, the point my mother called him a lady's man.
17:49
Speaker 1: Oh really, Oh, your mother had a she had a.
17:53
Speaker 4: Did she mean it not a way of labeling people?
17:58
Speaker 1: Did she Did she mean it in a positive way
18:01
Speaker 1: or in a negative way?
18:03
Speaker 4: My grandmother said it was negative.
18:07
Speaker 1: Yeah.
18:08
Speaker 9: She was very conservative and very uh yeah, yeah, see
18:12
Speaker 9: that would have been a very very negative thing to
18:14
Speaker 9: say about somebody.
18:15
Speaker 8: My back, I say it is about as pure church
18:17
Speaker 8: or Christ as you can get.
18:20
Speaker 1: There were whispers about a woman in the West Side Congregation, Doris.
18:25
Speaker 9: We heard the you know, connected rumors that she was
18:31
Speaker 9: involved her husband was having some serious issues.
18:36
Speaker 4: I don't know.
18:37
Speaker 9: I reading on it, I almost would think she was
18:41
Speaker 9: seeking I think he was probably her minister, because I
18:45
Speaker 9: think she went to a West Side one.
18:48
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think so at the time, and that's my understanding.
18:51
Speaker 9: I don't know that for I would almost say she
18:53
Speaker 9: was probably seeking some counseling from him.
18:56
Speaker 1: Charles Sennett was in love with a woman who is
18:58
Speaker 1: not his wife. H had a book of poems in
19:01
Speaker 1: his office called Memories of the Heart with Doris's picture
19:04
Speaker 1: in it. There were rumors someone saw Valentine Charles a
19:08
Speaker 1: given Dora. I talked with another from a member of
19:12
Speaker 1: the West Side Church, Carl Rodin. We sat in his
19:15
Speaker 1: living room. He hit a dog on his lap. I'm
19:18
Speaker 1: just curious. Was was he a goode?
19:21
Speaker 2: It was a nice little year won't be around? He
19:25
Speaker 2: was nice? Yeah, I mean you just couldn't hard a
19:28
Speaker 2: beat him. Somebody see he'd be the first one there
19:31
Speaker 2: was some food nursing home, he'd be the first one
19:35
Speaker 2: there was something to eat, or you know.
19:38
Speaker 1: Was he a good preacher?
19:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, I just want to say he had a split
19:42
Speaker 2: person out the best I can tail.
19:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you remember uh he had been It came
19:49
Speaker 1: out during the trial and he had been Uh he
19:53
Speaker 1: had been at a church in Jasper and had been
19:57
Speaker 1: fired from that job because he was the same thing,
19:59
Speaker 1: having an affair with someone in the church.
20:01
Speaker 2: We see, they should have told us when they fired him,
20:05
Speaker 2: but didn't. Nobody sent him back to him. Yeah, all
20:08
Speaker 2: over Wilsley. Yeah, there was.
20:10
Speaker 1: No way of there was he just do you remember
20:13
Speaker 1: anything about how he came to the church and first of.
20:15
Speaker 2: All, you know, I'll just remember there not Yeah, I
20:19
Speaker 2: don't know, Yeah, I don't know. They got to hold
20:22
Speaker 2: over anything.
20:24
Speaker 1: So he was really popular.
20:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he was an aspho. Well, like I said,
20:30
Speaker 2: he'd be the first one at somebody's house with food,
20:33
Speaker 2: you know, or he was just an ask guy. That's
20:36
Speaker 2: all you might got to Nobody never thought that, that's
20:40
Speaker 2: what you know, he would doing something like that.
20:43
Speaker 1: In the winter of nineteen eighty eight, Charles and his wife, Elizabeth,
20:47
Speaker 1: fought she wanted a divorce, and they both knew what
20:51
Speaker 1: that meant. He shouted at her, I won't lose another church.
20:55
Speaker 1: He was one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in debt
20:58
Speaker 1: from failed business ventures, This on a preacher's salary. His
21:02
Speaker 1: behavior grew erratic. The walls began to close in. He
21:06
Speaker 1: had a secret he could not share a marriage that
21:08
Speaker 1: was to integrating demons he was desperately trying to keep
21:12
Speaker 1: at bay. He still goes to preach every Sunday, but
21:15
Speaker 1: no one knows the full story of his life. No one,
21:19
Speaker 1: that is, except the only person who would have mattered
21:22
Speaker 1: for Charles Sennett, and that was God. One thing I
21:39
Speaker 1: don't understand is he seems completely ill suited for the ministry.
21:46
Speaker 1: He seems volatile. He's having an affair with a congregant,
21:51
Speaker 1: his finances are a mess, he's abusive to his wife's
21:56
Speaker 1: I'm just curious, how does he How would someone like
21:59
Speaker 1: that enter and survive in the ministry, particularly in a
22:03
Speaker 1: world where people are as conscious of conduct as the
22:09
Speaker 1: Church of Christ community is.
22:11
Speaker 7: He worked very hard to make sure nobody knew outside
22:14
Speaker 7: that tight circle of biological family.
22:17
Speaker 1: I asked the Church of Christ minister named Rodney Plunkett
22:19
Speaker 1: about the case he knew Charles Senate.
22:22
Speaker 7: That's not a typical, but yeah, they mask.
22:27
Speaker 1: And the amount of effort that must have gone into masking.
22:32
Speaker 7: That enormous Malcolm is absolutely enormous.
22:38
Speaker 1: I asked my theologian friend Lee Camp the same question.
22:42
Speaker 1: One of the things I'm trying to understand is we
22:46
Speaker 1: have this man Church of Christ, minister Charles Senate in
22:52
Speaker 1: little town, northwestern Alabama, who is having an affair and
22:58
Speaker 1: his wife has decided to divorce him. And you know,
23:04
Speaker 1: I'm wander were he you know, night or were he
23:10
Speaker 1: a Muslim or whatever, all those all those traditions would
23:13
Speaker 1: have would shape his his dysfunction in some way. And
23:18
Speaker 1: I'm curious how does his How does his tradition shape
23:21
Speaker 1: his dysfunction? That's what I'm trying to get at, what's
23:23
Speaker 1: going on inside his head as he processes the kind
23:27
Speaker 1: of his affair, his wife's decision it is, and the
23:32
Speaker 1: chaos of his own life. And he's he's the pastor
23:36
Speaker 1: of this this little white Clapper church in a corner
23:41
Speaker 1: of Sheffield.
23:43
Speaker 5: I mean, who knows, right, But you know, I would
23:46
Speaker 5: make up that the sense of shame is overwhelming, and
23:55
Speaker 5: when you're in a context of overwhelming shame, it can
24:02
Speaker 5: do terrifying things to the psyche. And in the absence
24:06
Speaker 5: of any sort of constructive grace. And I don't mean
24:15
Speaker 5: by that some flabby sense of all everything's okay, you know, grace,
24:19
Speaker 5: but some sort of constructive sense of grace, you know,
24:23
Speaker 5: it can quickly lead you to all sorts of madness.
24:29
Speaker 1: Christian grace, God's unmerited favor and loving kindness, a gift
24:34
Speaker 1: freely given to humanity, unearned and undeserved, a spontaneous act
24:39
Speaker 1: of generosity on God's part, extended to all humanity, regardless
24:44
Speaker 1: of their sin. What Camp was saying, and what many
24:47
Speaker 1: others in the Church of Christ came to believe, was
24:49
Speaker 1: that their church, particularly their church in that era forty
24:53
Speaker 1: fifty years ago, did not understand grace. Grand Aswald told
24:58
Speaker 1: me about his uncle, the song leader in a Church
25:00
Speaker 1: of Christ congregation, who once talked a little bit too
25:03
Speaker 1: much about grace and forgiveness at Sunday school, and so
25:07
Speaker 1: was let go. The church elder wouldn't even let him
25:10
Speaker 1: finish out his contract. Because if you had deciphered the
25:13
Speaker 1: rules of the Bible, the logic of the Christian text,
25:16
Speaker 1: then there shouldn't be any deviation should there It was
25:19
Speaker 1: all crystal clear. And if you started to grant forgiveness
25:22
Speaker 1: for those who strayed from that narrow path, then what
25:25
Speaker 1: incentive did people have to follow the narrow path? That
25:29
Speaker 1: was thinking And it's where the shame that Lee Camp
25:33
Speaker 1: was talking about came from, because in the absence of grace,
25:37
Speaker 1: there is no relief from transgression. People like Aswell and
25:41
Speaker 1: Lee Camp had been trying to push their church in
25:44
Speaker 1: a more forgiving direction to bring grace into their religious experience.
25:48
Speaker 1: But in the nineteen eighties in a small town in Alabama,
25:52
Speaker 1: this is what Asbel said.
25:54
Speaker 6: The idea behind that is this idea that if you
26:00
Speaker 6: want to one day be judged faithful, you have to
26:06
Speaker 6: have kept these rules and even to the point where
26:10
Speaker 6: if you break one of the rules, you can ask forgiveness.
26:14
Speaker 6: But the way that it felt as a kid was
26:17
Speaker 6: if you fell out of an airplane and you said
26:19
Speaker 6: a cuss word on the way down, and you didn't
26:21
Speaker 6: have a chance to repent of that word before you
26:23
Speaker 6: hit the ground, then you might your soul might be
26:29
Speaker 6: lost to the da Nation for Eternity.
26:32
Speaker 1: When Lee Kemp said I have loved my church and
26:35
Speaker 1: I have hated my church, this was the part he hated.
26:41
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's interesting that you said. You know,
26:44
Speaker 1: when we think, when we imagine what is going through
26:47
Speaker 1: the mind of someone who's marriage is in trouble, who
26:51
Speaker 1: is in love with another woman, one possible interpretation is
26:58
Speaker 1: that their motivation is genuine in the sense that they
27:00
Speaker 1: have fallen out of love with their wife and in
27:03
Speaker 1: love with someone else and see the possibility for a
27:07
Speaker 1: greater happiness and are willing to do or a certain
27:11
Speaker 1: amount of pain and heartbreak to get to that greater happiness.
27:15
Speaker 1: But that's not I'm not imagining that's what it is.
27:20
Speaker 1: It's he is in love with another woman and is
27:22
Speaker 1: consumed with shame over his predicament.
27:27
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, there's certainly, so far as his church
27:30
Speaker 5: context would be concerned, there's no viable route to a
27:34
Speaker 5: greater happiness with the other woman, because it's simply not
27:37
Speaker 5: going to be permitted unless you leave the community that
27:42
Speaker 5: you probably think it is the community that you have
27:45
Speaker 5: to be a part of if you're not going to
27:47
Speaker 5: go to hell. I mean, it's that's simple. Really Again,
27:52
Speaker 5: I don't want to speculate about what he's thinking, but
27:55
Speaker 5: I would conjecture, given all that we know, you know
27:58
Speaker 5: that I know about that experience, that there's it would
28:01
Speaker 5: be plausible that something like that's going on.
28:04
Speaker 1: You know, Which is a which is he's in a
28:10
Speaker 1: terrifying for him, a terrifying place.
28:14
Speaker 5: Sure, as I'm sure was his wife. There was this
28:21
Speaker 5: joke that said that it was easier to get forgiveness
28:28
Speaker 5: in the Church of Christ for murdering somebody than it
28:32
Speaker 5: was to be divorced.
28:38
Speaker 1: There is a proverb that dates back to the Middle
28:40
Speaker 1: Ages that I'm sure you've heard in one version or another,
28:44
Speaker 1: for want of a nail. The shoe was lost for
28:47
Speaker 1: want of a shoe. The horse was lost for want
28:49
Speaker 1: of a horse. The rider was lost for want of
28:51
Speaker 1: a rider. The message was lost for want of a message.
28:54
Speaker 1: The battle was lost for want of a battle. The
28:56
Speaker 1: kingdom was lost all for the want of a nail.
29:01
Speaker 1: The proverb of a lost nail is what's called a
29:04
Speaker 1: failure cascade. One small misstep or mishap leads to a
29:08
Speaker 1: second big problem, and a third even bigger problem, and finally,
29:12
Speaker 1: at the end of the chain catastrophe. The Northeastern blackout
29:19
Speaker 1: in August of two thousand and three, one of the
29:21
Speaker 1: biggest blackouts in history, was a failure cascade. A couple
29:25
Speaker 1: of trees on the East Lake transmission line outside of
29:28
Speaker 1: Cleveland grew a little bit too tall, and the electrical
29:32
Speaker 1: line at that precise moment, perhaps because of the summer heat,
29:35
Speaker 1: sagged a little bit more than usual and touched the trees.
29:38
Speaker 1: The contact caused a short. The short caused the power
29:42
Speaker 1: that used to run along that line to be rerouted
29:45
Speaker 1: along another line, which overloaded that line, causing an even
29:49
Speaker 1: bigger electrical surge to be rerouted to another line, and
29:52
Speaker 1: on an on, leading to a series of failures that
29:55
Speaker 1: rippled across the entire Northeastern grid, leaving fifty million people
30:01
Speaker 1: without electricity. For want of a chainsaw, the power was lost.
30:11
Speaker 1: The Alabama murders is about a classic failure cascade. Only
30:16
Speaker 1: were the ever widening ripples were caused not by mechanical
30:19
Speaker 1: or institutional defects, but failures of character, of justice, of compassion.
30:45
Speaker 1: Coming up on the Alabama murders, that.
30:48
Speaker 8: The viciousness was there that he could do something like that,
30:51
Speaker 8: I don't know.
30:53
Speaker 6: I entered the call, and I got all the information
30:57
Speaker 6: on who done it, who was all involved in all
31:00
Speaker 6: the particulars.
31:02
Speaker 4: It was having an affair with a parishioner. There were
31:07
Speaker 4: seventy people that went to that church. How did they
31:10
Speaker 4: not know that this was going on.
31:13
Speaker 7: I don't know which one of them, Kilber, I really don't.
31:16
Speaker 2: And I think both of them got what they probably
31:20
Speaker 2: deserved legally and morally.
31:24
Speaker 6: And at the time, we had had an execution from
31:26
Speaker 6: now Alabama for a very long time.
31:29
Speaker 4: And I said, sure, Well, you know, I didn't know
31:31
Speaker 4: what I was getting in through what is taught either
31:34
Speaker 4: at nursing school or as an emt or as a doctor.
31:37
Speaker 1: Cannot be lifted into the death chamber, like it's not
31:41
Speaker 1: the same place.
31:44
Speaker 3: He would say to himself, Turn to the right, to
31:46
Speaker 3: the victim's family and apologize. Turn to the left, tell
31:49
Speaker 3: my family, I love him. So he would have this
31:50
Speaker 3: little practice to the right, I'm sorry, to the left,
31:54
Speaker 3: I love you.
32:01
Speaker 1: Provision's history is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Bend A. Daff Hyffrey,
32:05
Speaker 1: and Nina Bird Lawrence. Additional reporting by bend ad aff
32:09
Speaker 1: Haffrey and Lee Hedgepeth. Our editor is Karen Chukerji, fact
32:13
Speaker 1: checking by Kate Furby. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.
32:17
Speaker 1: Production support from Luke Clemond, Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence,
32:22
Speaker 1: Original scoring by Luis Guerra with Paul Brainard and Jimmy Bodd.
32:26
Speaker 1: Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorsky. I'm Malcolm Glaba.