Fire and brimstone, reenacted

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Chaplain Alan Farley’s voice rumbles through the small brick church in Appomattox.

“Take heed to these words,” he booms. “There is a storm coming, and it will be dreadful.”

He pauses.

His words hang over the pews like a dark cloud before a downpour. Outside, rain taps softly against the stained glass windows. When he speaks again, his voice drops to just above a whisper.

“This storm,” he says, “is none other than the wrath of the holy God.”

The church is quiet as Farley delivers his fiery sermon. It was originally preached by a Confederate chaplain in 1862.

Dressed in period costume, Farley infuses the message with urgency and vigor. He warns of the terrible fate of sinners, and urges the unsaved to accept Jesus Christ as their savior.

He speaks to about 100 people, who have gathered at Appomattox Baptist Temple — just minutes away from where the real Civil War ended — to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Farley’s ministry: the Reenactor’s Missions for Jesus Christ (RMJC).

Farley, 59, is the founder and driving force behind RMJC, an evangelical ministry aimed at spreading the gospel to Civil War reenactors and spectators. The Appomattox resident runs his ministry out of Timberlake Baptist Church, and his mission is simple: “to see a soul saved.”

Farley was an early pioneer of bringing religion to the nation’s Civil War re-enactments, and today it’s his full-time job. The stern-faced minister travels an estimated 35,000 miles a year to reenactments across the country. Depending on the event, he assumes one of two characters: a Confederate regimental chaplain or, on the Union side, a U.S. Christian Commission delegate.

Farley is a burly man with clear blue eyes and a bushy beard that runs gray to white from cheek to chest. At today’s re-enactment, he wears a civilian’s period costume: a white shirt, gray vest, black slacks and a “sack coat,” so named because such coats were originally made from feed sacks for animals.

Confederate chaplains, he says, had no authorized uniforms and didn’t have much money, so they typically wore what their wives sewed for them.

Farley has nurtured an interest in Civil War history since childhood but did not get involved with reenactments until his late 20s. During long weekends on the battlefield, Farley felt something was missing.

“I really felt a hollowness, a desire to go to church,” he says, adding that there was little chance for worship during the packed weekend schedules.

In the winter of 1983, Farley laid down his rifle and began a full-time chaplain impression. Two years later, he started his nonprofit organization, RMJC.

“There was early resistance to let a chaplain into the schedule,” he says.

The focus tended to center on the “blood and guts” aspects of battles, he says. But when Farley was omitted from the schedule, he says he would hold a service anyway, and use word-of-mouth to get reenactors to attend.

Before long, Farley’s mission caught on and he became a fixture at reenactments. The rest is history, quite literally.

The Civil War re-enactor’s community is about 50,000 strong in the United States, plus thousands of spectators. Farley says upwards of 2,000 have prayed to receive Christ as their savior during his sermons.

Aside from evangelizing, he is working to expand the National Civil War Chaplains Museum in the DeMoss Learning Center at Liberty University, which includes historical artifacts he and others have collected over the years. The museum’s mission is to provide an all-inclusive look at the role chaplains, priests, rabbis and religious organizations played in the war. Among those on the museum’s board of advisors is Dr. James Robertson Jr., a prominent Civil War historian at Virginia Tech.

Kenny Rowlette, a Liberty University English professor and longtime reenactor, is director of the museum, which resides in a small room in DeMoss. The museum is independent of the university, and leaders are trying to raise funds to expand into a 10,000-square-foot space by next year.

Rowlette, who teaches the course, “Literature of the Civil War,” says that the story of religion on the battlefield is one of the “last untold stories of the Civil War.”
He says that in addition to providing salvation, religion had practical, even strategic, applications. For example, he says it kept soldiers away from distractions like gambling, prostitutes and alcohol, and promoted cohesion among the ranks. Plus, he adds, soldiers who believed they were saved were more likely to be daring on the battlefield.

For Farley, portraying a Civil War chaplain is personal. He has ancestors who fought on both sides of the war and has a strong personal faith.

Today, his intensity behind the pulpit is palpable. The congregation occasionally punctuates his sermon with “amens” and head nods.

Farley says the fire and brimstone rhetoric that was common during the Civil War era is applicable today. In his view, modern permutations of evangelical Christianity tend to favor a benevolent, feel-good God. He says this version can be “watered down,” and it’s important for people to be reminded of what lies ahead of them if they reject Jesus Christ.

When the sermon is over, churchgoers amble outside for lunch. Sixty gallons of Brunswick stew simmer in large vats, and a pig roasts over an open fire.
As the lunch gets underway, Farley fades into the background. The crowd’s attention turns to four grizzled soldiers preparing to fire a cannon into a grassy field beside the church.

Behind a line of yellow caution tape, four members from the Hoffman family, all dressed in period clothing, watch the spectacle unfold. The Hoffmans met Farley through their home church and attend reenactments when on break from their missionary trips in Kenya. Even though mission work usually takes place miles, cultures and languages away from Lynchburg, they feel a kinship to Farley’s evangelical mission.

“Whether we teach it in Africa in another language or here in the U.S., it’s the same message,” says Brian Hoffman, who speaks Swahili and the tribal language of Samburu.

At the soldier’s command, the cannon unleashes a tremendous boom, and the air clouds up with gunsmoke. On a nearby road, passing cars slow down to watch. Cannons are fired. Muskets are shot.

With the small skirmish under way, the sky breaks from solid gray to a glimmer of blue.