How to set preferred encoding in WSGI to UTF-8

Feeling a bit crazy here. I've got Apache set up with mod_wsgi, but I can't get the encoding to work properly. I have:

• tested that mod_wsgi is running in daemon mode
• read Graham Dumpleton's blog post about setting up the lang and locale settings for the WSGIDaemonProcess directive.
• created a minimal test that seems to demonstrate the issue

# I recompiled the mod_wsgi file to get the Python version correct
sys.version = '3.8.6 (default, Sep 24 2020, 21:54:23) \n[GCC 8.3.0]'
sys.prefix = '/usr/local'
sys.path = ['/usr/local/lib/python38.zip', '/usr/local/lib/python3.8', '/usr/local/lib/python3.8/lib-dynload', '/usr/local/lib/python3.8/site-packages', '/usr/local/src/scorched']

# This seems to be a timing thing? Not sure, but possibly problematic
locale.getlocale() = (None, None)
# This was fixed by setting lang or locale (not sure which)
locale.getdefaultlocale() = ('en_US', 'UTF-8')
sys.getdefaultencoding() = 'utf-8'

# These seem like a problem...
sys.getfilesystemencoding() = 'ascii'
locale.getpreferredencoding(False): 'ANSI_X3.4-1968'

# It's daemon mode
mod_wsgi.process_group = 'cl'

My WSGI configs look like this:

    WSGIScriptAlias / /opt/courtlistener/docker/apache/wsgi-configs/python_version_test.py
    WSGIDaemonProcess cl \
      threads=10 \
      processes=64 \
      python-path=/usr/local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/ \
      lang='en_US.UTF-8' \
      locale='en_US.UTF-8'
    WSGIProcessGroup cl
    WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}
    WSGIPassAuthorization On

When I log into the server and start python in the terminal, this line works fine, but it fails when it runs via mod_wsgi:

from reporters_db import REPORTERS

All that line does is import a json file that has some utf-8 content in it. Here's the code behind that import:

db_root = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__))
with open(os.path.join(db_root, "data", "reporters.json")) as f:
    REPORTERS = json.load(f, object_hook=datetime_parser)

Since the json call above doesn't have the encoding specified, it uses ASCII and fails:

 Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "/opt/courtlistener/docker/apache/wsgi-configs/python_version_test.py", line 6, in <module>
     from reporters_db import REPORTERS
   File "/usr/local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/reporters_db/__init__.py", line 22, in <module>
     REPORTERS = json.load(f, object_hook=datetime_parser)
   File "/usr/local/lib/python3.8/json/__init__.py", line 293, in load
     return loads(fp.read(),
   File "/usr/local/lib/python3.8/encodings/ascii.py", line 26, in decode
     return codecs.ascii_decode(input, self.errors)[0]
 UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 441720: ordinal not in range(128)

How can I tell it (and the rest of my codebase) to use utf-8 like sane adults?

Edit 1

Perhaps it is important to mention that I'm running apache with the following command:

exec apache2ctl -D FOREGROUND "$@"

I thought that would source the /etc/apache2/envvars file, so I appended the following to that file:

export LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

And I tried tweaking my startup command to:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8" exec apache2ctl -D FOREGROUND "$@"

I was hopeful, but no. Still no progress.