Preacher Girl

The life of Uldine Utley is a story of audacity, innovation, defiance, and unspeakable tragedy. Thomas A. Robinson tells it well.

~Randall Balmer, Dartmouth College, Author of The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond

Uldine Utley just may be the most famous religious figure in twentieth-century American history about whom most alive today have never heard. This is a fascinating story, well told, of the religious roaring twenties.

~Douglas A. Sweeney, Professor of Church History and the History of Christian Thought, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

With lively narrative and vivid detail, Robinson provides a complete account of the life and ministry of Uldine Utley, one of the most prominent, and certainly one of the most fascinating, figures in the history of American revivalism. Those interested in the story of this 'preacher girl' can find no better introduction than Robinson's sympathetic and engaging account.

~Kristin Du Mez, Associate Professor of History, Calvin College

This is the first deep study of Uldine Utley, the most famous of an army of little girl preachers that popped up all over North America in the 1920s and 1930s. It is fascinating reading for anyone interested in how fundamentalist Christianity intersected with the public’s hunger for spectacle that marked 1920s popular culture. Preacher Girl is an especially poignant and sobering look at the way the pressures of high-profile revivalism can split the revivalist’s personality between its public and private dimensions.

~Michael S. Hamilton, Professor and Chair, Department of History, Seattle Pacific University

Building on Utley's own writing, Robinson skillfully weaves into this biography of Utley during her years of fame snapshots of the multiple contexts in which she came to shine.

~Choice

…an engaging and meticulously researched biography of the childhood career of Pentecostal revivalist Uldine Utley.

~Emily Bailey, Reading Religion

[Robinson] provides a full account of the controversies and difficult family dynamics behind Utley’s smiling public presence and does not shrink from the hard reality that revivalism was a business, ultimately about making money.

~Margaret Bendroth, Journal of American History

…Robinson succeeds in reintroducing a neglected yet once widespread phenomenon in American religious and cultural history--the child evangelist. At the very least, he confronts readers with the problem of what it meant to be a 'conservative' in the culture wars of the 1920s when contending for the faith often took the form of anything but adherence to traditional ecclesiology or statements of faith and practice.

~Richard M. Gamble, Journal of Ecclesiastical History

Robinson tells the story of Utley's life with verve and compassion, filling in the background of America in the Roaring Twenties and Depressing Thirties. He is well aware of the secondary literature, from Frederick Lewis Allen to Alan Heimert...Robinson neither blames God nor exonerates Him for the tragedy of Utley's life. Instead he tells the story with tears, as it looks from the earth, not from a heavenly perspective.

~Charles White, Fides Et Historia

In Preacher Girl: Uldine Utley and the Industry of Revival, Thomas A. Robinson respectfully recounts the rise and fall of a forgotten revivalist childhood preacher through a careful examination of primary source materials and provocative analysis of her life and ministry.

~Heather Joy Zimmerman, Journal of the Evangelical Homiletics Society