VOTUPORANGA, Brazil — Ester Souza looks into the mirror and begins her transformation. She changes out of her pink T-shirt and shorts with flowers and butterflies and into a sober brown blouse and dress slacks. She weaves her long curly hair into two braids on top of her head. A touch of makeup and her expression shifts. The easy smile gives way to a look of deep focus.
“My heart is racing,” she says. She knows dozens of people are waiting for her.
When she steps up to the pulpit of her father’s small church in rural São Paulo state, the congregation leans in. Ester returns her listeners’ focus. Standing before an open Bible, preternaturally poised, she grips the microphone and starts to preach.
Pain cannot corrupt hope, she promises, because suffering can be turned into a testimony. It’s her own story. She describes the kidney infection she had in 2020, her two months in the hospital, the wait for a transplant, the near-daily hemodialysis, how close she came to death.
Some in the congregation sob. Some cheer. They believe she’s a miracle.
Ester raises a hand toward the heavens, takes a deep breath and releases her core message.
“The doctors said no,” she says, “but God said yes.”
The congregation erupts in tearful cries of “Hallelujah!” and “Praise the Lord!”
Ester is 8 years old.
Her mother will upload her sermon to the child’s social media accounts, which have nearly 2 million followers. One video, in which she delivers the same testimony on the venerable Brazilian variety program “Show de Calouros,” has more than 11 million views.
Ester is one of several children helping to spread evangelical Christianity in Brazil, a movement that’s blending youth, faith and social media to win souls.
This South American nation of 212 million, settled by Portugal following borders decreed by Pope Alexander VI, is home to the world’s largest Catholic population. But evangelicalism is gaining.
The evangelical share of the population has quadrupled from 6.5 percent in 1980 to more than 26 percent today. By 2050, demographers predict, Latin America’s largest country will have an evangelical majority.
The Catholic Church has long tried to attract young followers. It runs the world’s largest school system. Its World Youth Day, held once every few years, attracts millions of attendees (the 2013 edition drew more than 3 million to Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach). And in September, Pope Leo XIV canonized Carlo Acutis, a 15-year-old gamer and influencer who died in 2006, the church’s first millennial saint.
But roles in which Catholic youth may evangelize are limited. And it takes years to become a priest.
Anyone, though, can pick up a Bible and start preaching. Even a child.
Children have long preached the Gospel in Brazil, as in the United States and other countries. The turning point, researchers Wania Mesquita and Vânia Morales Sierra say, was the arrival of the internet. Social media has fueled the rise of evangelical influencers.
“At first, these children would preach and only later record their sermons to share the message,” Sierra said. “The goal wasn’t to go viral. It was to evangelize. Today, the internet is both the means and the end. Children now produce content directly for social media.”
To admirers, they’re innocent vessels of inspiration. But critics question the mix of children, religion, money and social media celebrity culture.
One of the main concerns, critics say, is that influencing of any kind pulls children out of the space they need for normal development and pushes them toward entrepreneurship and financial gain, exposing them to online harassment and threatening their mental health.
Miguel Oliveira, 15, called himself a prophet. One of his videos captures him tearing up a woman’s leukemia diagnosis and promising to cure her. “I tear the cancer, I filter your blood, and I cure leukemia,” he said. Then, shouting: “I got chills! There’s a cure for you!”
Some viewers called him “Antichrist” and “false prophet.” Some issued threats. Brazil’s Child Protection Council, a government body tasked with safeguarding the rights of minors, had his Instagram account suspended and barred him from traveling to preach.
Authorities continue to investigate the threats and harassment, but he regained access to his account in June and resumed traveling and posting fervent videos.
In such cases, analysts say, a child preacher might simultaneously be a charlatan and a victim. “By the age of 14, a child has the discernment to know right from wrong,” Sierra says. “But the key question is whether they have the guidance necessary to reflect on the consequences of their actions.”
Still, evangelical churches are investing in children, says Luciana Petersen of the Institute for the Study of Religion in Rio de Janeiro, giving them their own place within the congregation. “There is an intention that is not about proselytizing but about recognizing the potential of children to serve the church in some way, understanding that children are important to God.”
Ester says she enjoys being famous. She’s sweet, chatty and charismatic. She races around the small house where she lives with her parents and two older siblings, pointing out her favorite drawings and books. She indicates a picture of a Polynesian princess.
“Don’t you think I look like Moana?” she asks and smiles. (She does.)
Ester’s parents believed she would become a gospel singer. They’ve been filming and posting her performances online since she was 3 in hopes she’d go viral. But she had a different calling. Her first sermon came unexpectedly in late 2019.
“It surprised me,” says her father, Lucas Souza, 41, a pastor himself. “We were at a family gathering to pray and she recited Psalm 91”: “A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.”
“She mixed up the numbers a little,” Souza says, “but in her own way, she told us we didn’t need to be afraid, because God was in control.”
Months later, she fell ill.
She spent two months in the hospital with severe kidney failure. Some of that time was during the pandemic, so her parents could not stay with her. “I cried when they left. I was afraid without my mom,” she says. “One night, I saw a man in a shining white robe, and he said he would take care of me. Then I felt calm again.”
“I think it was God.”
Ester received her kidney transplant in March 2021. It was then that she began preaching regularly at her parents’ church.
In July 2024, she finally went viral.
“She was telling the story of David and Goliath,” Souza says. “I posted it and put my phone back in my pocket. When I checked it again, it already had thousands of views.”
Ester’s parents haven’t figured out what, exactly, makes some videos catch on while others fall flat. But they believe that Ester’s illness and recovery give her a kind of credibility among adults and the simplicity of her preaching wins over the younger ones.
“Children have more purity and innocence. They’re closer to God,” says Adriana Souza, 37, Ester’s mother and also a pastor. “I think people believe adults are more capable of deceiving one another. But Ester is a child. If she’s speaking, it must be God.”
Fifty people attended the July service; seven were children. Nathalia, 11, goes to church with her family almost every week. But she enjoys it best when Ester is preaching.
“I understand better when she’s the one speaking,” she said. “Adults talk too fast.”
Ester steps down from the stage, her cheeks flushed, and heads to a small room with Nathalia and other children to color as a television shows a cartoon about Jesus. Beatriz Souza, Ester’s 21-year-old sister, supervises. Ester hopes: “Can we get ice cream after?”
Outside, her father begins the second part of the service. He raises his voice to cast out demons and asks congregants to pay their tithes. On the night The Washington Post attended, the children did not watch that part of the service.
After Miguel’s case was publicized, Ester’s father says, some people began criticizing her — from the content of her sermons to the color of her lipstick.
“If I wanted to push Ester to gain millions and millions of followers using these practices of casting demons and healing, I could have,” he says. “But it wouldn’t be in a positive way. And when you don’t do things positively, the fruits don’t come.”
Ester preaches at her father’s church almost every week. But she has also started to accept invitations to deliver sermons in other cities and even to do some advertising. She enjoys being on the pulpit, she says, and is never tired when she’s up there.
Outside church, she rarely talks about God. She loves soccer, drawing, and playing in the sand and water.
When she forgets to update her daily routine for her social media followers, it’s her father who reminds her.
At a park near her house one morning in July, Ester doesn’t want to stop playing in the sand. Not for lunch, and certainly not to record a video talking about her day so far. “Can I have just 10 more minutes?”
Her dad agrees, then insists it’s time. She takes a deep breath. She drops her focused, sand-castle-building look and adopts an easy smile.
She greets her fans with her now-signature phrase: “Hi, my loves. How are you guys doing? Are you okay?”
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