Fundamentalists’ war on theological modernism and cultural decadence in the 1920s often forged strange alliances in the United States. Contending for the old time religion and opposing Darwinism, alcohol, divorce and worldly entertainment united forces otherwise rent asunder by theology, ecclesiology and such contentious issues as the proper role of women in ministry. With America's identity as a Christian nation at stake, distinctions blurred in ways that challenge assumptions a century later on where the battle lines were drawn in postwar America. Revival in the Church and in American culture mobilised all sorts of crusaders in a common cause. Even child evangelists answered the call to do battle with the world, the flesh and the devil. Illuminating a forgotten field of that war, Thomas Robinson, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Canada, reconstructs the story of Uldine Utley (1912–95), largely forgotten now but once as famous as Billy Sunday and any Hollywood starlet of the Jazz Age. Utley succeeded beyond anything she or her parents imagined in the revival ‘industry’ of the Twenties, drawing large crowds, attracting headline notice in the press, winning celebrity endorsements from leading Fundamentalists, and publishing her own magazine and sermon collections. John Roach Straton, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Manhattan, overrode the objections of his deacons to promote the child prodigy at the height of her career, sharing his pulpit with a child, a female, and a Pentecostal baptised in the Holy Spirit and blessed with the gift of tongues and faith healing. Utley began preaching at the age of eleven, soon after her conversion in Southern California under the ministry of Pentecostal revivalist Aimee Semple McPherson. She ended her public career at twenty-four, by then licensed and ordained in the Methodist Episcopal Church. In this sympathetic account, Robinson confronts the dark side of fame, the costs imposed on a child evangelist by a rootless family life, and the suffering endured through mental illness. This is a recognisably human story. It puts a face on what are too often abstract categories. Robinson was both blessed and cursed by his discovery of a trove of new material late in the writing of his book. His unwieldy account ends up being two books – one an intimate family portrait, one a story of the big business of modern revivalism – that never really hold together. It is marred by disorganisation, repetition, extraneous details and a distracting amount of speculation that raises nagging questions about how much concrete evidence there is for many of his generalisations about Utley's place in the history of American revivalism. Historians of American religion will be left wanting to know more about the criticisms levelled against her and her supporters in the religious and popular press. Nevertheless, 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.