Braveheart’s Warped History Keeps Suckering Evangelicals
When Chloé Zhao took home the awards for Best Picture and Best Director for her movie Nomadland at this year’s Academy Awards, she made history. The film was only the second best-picture winner directed by a woman, and the first by a woman of color. In her acceptance speech, she thanked those she had “met on the road” who had taught “us the power of resilience and hope and for reminding us what true kindness looks like.”
Twenty-five years ago, the Best Director and Best Picture awards went to a strikingly different feature film. That year, Mel Gibson captured both for his epic film Braveheart. Gibson also starred in the film as the freedom-loving, kilt-wearing William Wallace. Based on the legendary 13th-century Scottish warrior, the film was less about kindness and hope and more about unquenchable violence avenging evil and injustice. In a very different way, Gibson’s film, too, would make history.
Gibson was a conservative Catholic, but it was white evangelicals who would become the film’s most fervent fans. With William Wallace their hero and “Freedom!” their battle cry, American evangelicals assigned the film a prominent place in their culture-wars liturgies.