More young Quebecers are turning to evangelism. A new documentary explores why

Those influencers are getting their inspiration clearly from the States, from everything that's going on in the Christian creators' dome in the States, but also they are getting more and more political. That's a first for the religious sphere in Quebec since the days I wasn't born. You say you were surprised by this trend involving people your age, people in their 20s. How did you learn about this, that there was this trend of seeing young Quebecers converting to evangelism? One of the personas in the documentary, so Jérémy Noah Thériault, who people must know as GNT, a YouTube creator. Two years back, I was doing a reporting on him for a whole different subject. One day, he came back from a trip in Peru. He did some ayahuasca, and he told me that his life was getting better because he found Jesus. While digging in that subject and realizing that there was a bunch of Quebecers and preachers praising the Lord's will on Instagram, TikTok and everything, I realized that, OK, is there a movement here? With the production house, we worked on a pitch for a documentary and here we are. You know, the evangelical people, they know how in Quebec we talk about religion and a lot of them were scared, scared to talk. In our progress, I try to be more transparent. So every time I had to meet a potential person that wanted to participate, I've always been really transparent. We're not here to shame your religion. We're not here to praise it. We're here to understand it. So who are these young people who now call themselves evangelicals? They can be your little sister, your friend. But the evangelical people as a whole, it's a Protestant branch. It's a branch that has two priorities. The first one, the Bible. Everything goes back to the writings. Everything goes back to the words in this book. And after that, they have a mission of conversion. You can imagine the pastors in the States, you know, in the big church, mega churches. A lot of people in the film that you've interviewed, they came from backgrounds where they say, I was going through a hard time or I found myself addicted to alcohol, addicted to drugs. And this saved me. This put me on a better path. mostly for the the newcomers the new converted people that there was always a moment in their life where they had big suffering but you know what we met some christians that had a perfect life we can say and just wanted to believe in something bigger than them there's a reason why those people have always the same story about how they found jesus the pastors teach them to really see their story in another way and with the potential of telling it to other people and convert some more people you speak to a lot of men in this film we get to women later in the film and it seems like a lot of these spokespeople of this religion are men first of all in those churches the the authority are the pastors and pastors are mostly men some churches refuses to have some women pastors. Some here in Quebec accept it, but there's also another way of thinking of analyzing this phenomenon. The story that are being told by the believers, it's stories that resonate to the young men. Success, making a family, having one vision on the gender, you know, male and female. We tried to speak to a lot of Christian women and it was tough. What role is social media playing now? Two points. The first one, it has been proven that the algorithm for the past few years have pushed a lot of sensational content, conservative content, content that makes emotions, you know. So we think that social media as a base has a lot of influence on why this movement is rising. And on the second part, evangelical people are really good communicators. They have budget. They have good ways of spreading their gospel. They are on the social medias. You bring up also in the documentary kind of the sense of hierarchy. You know, it's God, then it's men, then it's women, then it's children. You have social media content creators and influencers and pastors and preachers. Has the brand morphed as a result of social media? Are their transformations genuine? We've talked to a lot of experts. We can see in Quebec that there's been a change in how those people talk about religion.