Hi all,
First: thank you all for responding so quickly.
Second: The main reason I chose FreeBSD was because I thought it was going to be most similar to my development platform (OS X), which apparently is using clang by default. If this turns out to be too hard, though, I may just change operating systems to one with better support.
That said, I have been browsing through the configuration files, trying to find where to set "CC= cc". I was trying to use the Darwin config files to guide me, but that's not really helpful because the freebsd config files don't look similar (or just link to unix defaults). So, some more guidance from you all would be needed here.
For the time being, I'm going to try and make sure my gcc compiler is correctly linking its libraries. That seems to be the path of least resistance.