Evangelicals embraced Gibson’s films as devotional expressions of militant masculinity.

Evidence

For many evangelicals, however, watching the movie was an act of devotion. Evangelicals were already fans of Gibson’s work. Gibson was Catholic, but evangelicals recognized that they shared the common creed of militant Christianity and heroic masculinity. For many evangelical writers, references to Braveheart rivaled biblical references when it came to discerning God’s will for men. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 477

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the reader’s central task: consumer culture (film) transmitting militant masculinity as religious identity across even a Catholic-Protestant boundary.
• ADDENDUM: The ‘common creed of militant Christianity and heroic masculinity’ crossing the Catholic-Protestant line echoes the cross-cultural moral-signaling analysis in ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ — identity transmitted through shared cultural codes, not doctrine.