Does anyone know why when using Freemarker and Scriptable Email Templates, eval throws a syntax error when pulling a JSON that is store as a longtext field. It does not throw if I copy/paste the JSON and wrap it around single quotes. I would assume that its considered a string when I pull the value from my custom record.

<#assign json = customrecord.cust_record_json?eval>

This fails

<#assign json = '{ "key1": "value1", "key2", "value2"}'?eval>

This works, and the JSON is what would have been stored in cust_record_json