Free State of Jones is not technically a Christian movie, but it might as well be.
In the film, Oscar-winner Matthew McConaughey plays Newton Knight, a Confederate deserter who leads a rebellion against the Confederate States of America in his home state of Mississippi. Based on a historical character, Knight’s motives for the rebellion are complex: He’s tired of soldiers stripping his and his neighbors’ farms clean, leaving families with nothing to eat over the winter. He’s disgusted by the fact that rich slaveholders can wriggle free of wartime duty while poor farmers are fighting and dying for a “cause” they have no real stake in. And even early on, McConaughey’s Knight understands that there’s something wrong with one human being owning another.
All of these motivations share something integral to faith: A sense of justice. It’s not right, he’d say. It’s not fair. It’s not moral. And for Knight, true justice is determined not by man, but by a just, loving God.
In the clip below, you see evidence of Knight’s faith—as well as his grief and anger.
The boy didn’t need to go that way, Knight’s face tells us. He shouldn’t. When a fellow soldier tells him that the boy died with honor, Knight says, “No, Will. He just died.”
Throughout the movie, Knight and his band of fellow deserters and runaway slaves, makes strong delineations between God’s way and man’s injustice. They turn to the Bible to justify the revolt, quoting Galatians to say it’s right to reap what they sow. As they grumble over the unfair advantages the rich have in the Confederacy, one of Knight’s compadres paraphrases Ezekiel 7:19: “All their gold and all their silver won’t protect them from the wrath of the Lord.”
Most poignantly, when a slave named Rachel finally runs away from her abusive master, there’s a suggestion that it’s at least in part because she has a better grasp of her God-given self-worth: She secretly learned to read while in slavery, and the first book she read was the Bible.
“Knight had a moral code rooted in the Bible and the Declaration of Independence: love thy neighbor as thyself, and all men are created equal,” McConaughey told The Daily Beast. “So he had a very radical relationship with his own independence, and interdependence—which is very American. Extremely American.” McConaughey added that, “All of this, the abolition of slavery in the Civil War at this time, they were almost all led by religious movements—Christian movements—that were trumping the ideals that everyone else had. They went further into it and said, ‘No, this is not right—because of the Bible.’”
The Free State of Jones can plod at times. It’s not at the level of, say, Director Gary Ross’s 2003 film Seabiscuit. But it does convey what a powerful force that faith was and is. Religion, at its best, asks us to stop thinking about ourselves and consider the bigger questions—questions of what’s right, what’s fair, what’s just. Throughout American history, faith has been a critical driving force in what has made the country what it is. What makes it, I’d argue, special.
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