Revisionist History · Pushkin Industries

The Alabama Murders - Part 1: The True Church

October 2, 2025·33 min·3 clips

A theologian describes the overwhelming shame in the Church of Christ that can lead to madness without grace.

A friend points the host toward Kate Porterfield, a psychologist with what sounds like one of the strangest jobs in America. Their first meeting is in a Manhattan conference room, which is an oddly plain place for a story like this to begin. The question is simple enough. How did Porterfield get here, and could what she knows become a podcast? The answer takes time. Their conversations run for hours, then keep going, until one person starts to matter more than anything else: a man on death row. Porterfield is careful with her language. She does not treat him like a file or a puzzle. She talks about him as a person, and that choice tells you something about the road ahead. This is not just a march through evidence. It is a story that has stayed with her. Then the episode changes rooms. It steps into the religious world Charles Sennett came from, a Church of Christ culture built around hard lines and absolute rules. Women cannot take part in a church service. Singing must be a cappella. Instruments are treated as frivolous. Ordinary pleasures can start to look dangerous. Dancing, swimming around people of the opposite sex, and even wearing shorts in public carry the threat of lust and hell. One preacher makes the point with a cruel little lesson: after seeing a man jogging in shorts, he tells a van of teenagers that the man may look nice now but will look nice in hell. That is the air Charles Sennett grew up breathing. He was born in West Virginia, his father was a Church of Christ preacher, and he married Elizabeth Dorlean in 1962. Elizabeth arrives through smaller, gentler details. Susan Mosley, a nurse at a local weight loss clinic, remembers her as a preacher's wife who loved her grandbabies. Cookies, weekend visits, coloring books, a small table in an exercise room. The episode lets those ordinary things sit for a minute before the darker story moves in. It begins with a psychologist, a strict church world, and a woman remembered through care.

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