A former high-profile leader of the “conservative resurgence” in the Southern Baptist Convention has become a Roman Catholic.
Jerry Johnson first came to public attention in 1990 when as a 25-year-old pastor he was elected a trustee of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and promptly accused seminary President Roy Honeycutt of not believing the Bible.
After Honeycutt retired and was replaced by Al Mohler — the pick of Johnson and other conservatives — Johnson earned a degree from the seminary and later worked there, ultimately serving as dean of Boyce College from 2002 to 2004. From 2004 to 2008, he was president of Criswell College in Dallas and again from 2010 to 2013. He left there to become president of National Religious Broadcasters from 2013 to 2019. In between his stints at Criswell College, Johnson served as vice president for academic development at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Johnson was a trustee at Southern Seminary from 1989 to 1998 and chaired the board from 1996 to 1998.
In 1990, Johnson was serving as the young pastor of Central Baptist Church in Aurora, Colo., with no seminary degree on his resume. In April that year, he accused Honeycutt and several faculty members of “doctrinal infidelity.”
“One would have to be as blind as a mole not to see that Dr. Honeycutt just does not believe the Bible,” Johnson told fellow trustees. Two years later, Honeycutt announced his retirement and was replaced in 1993 by Mohler, who now is the longest-serving seminary president in SBC history.
“Do you want to know what is different about Patriot Mobile? God is at the helm of our business and we are His stewards,” Jerry Johnson said at the Turning Point USA Believers’ Summit in 2024.
Today, having parted ways with the NRB, Johnson works as an ambassador for Patriot Mobile, the Texas-based cell phone provider that funds Christian nationalist causes.
He also serves as treasurer of the Council for National Policy and is a member of that group’s Executive Committee. Americans United for Separation of Church and State has called CNP “the scariest Christian nationalist group you’ve never heard of.”
‘Had to give Catholicism a fair hearing’
Thirty-five years after accusing Honeycutt of not believing the Bible, Johnson has abandoned his Baptist heritage to embrace Catholicism.
“I had to give Catholicism a fair hearing,” he says in a video published by TFP Student Action, an arm of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property — a far-right Catholic group that advocates against homosexuality and embraces “traditional” Catholicism. “I might not agree, but I certainly had to explore it and give it a chance.”
Johnson describes himself as “an activist in the Southern Baptist Convention” who “spoke up” against theological liberalism. “But nine years later, I ended up as chairman of that (trustee) board and we brought in a good seminary president. We had an 80% to 90% turnover in the faculty in the space of 10 years. And that was my life and that was my brand, so to speak, in ministry was standing up for the authority, the reliability, the accuracy of the Bible as the word of God written.”
Johnson says he “read my way” into Catholicism, starting with C.S. Lewis, an Anglican, and G.K. Chesterton, an Anglican who converted to Catholicism, and then Hilaire Belloc, a French author who was greatly influenced by Catholicism.
Jerry Johnson
He read other books and began watching the Catholic TV channel EWTN, he said, and “felt drawn” to the faith. “For about five years, I’ve seriously been exploring and considering the Catholic faith.”
A turning point came as he was hunting elk on a mountain in Colorado in the deep snow, he explains, “and I had been thinking about this all day and I just knelt down there in the snow with my rifle in hand and said, ‘Yes, Lord, if this is your will, I’ll do it. I still want to know. Lead me, guide me, close the door if I’m mistaken. But it’s a matter of the heart and the will. I made the decision that day. And it was about a year later that I came into the church.”
Biblical inerrancy and Communion
However, he had to retain his “brand,” he says, which is “believing the Bible was inspired, that it’s authoritative, that it’s inerrant.” And that biblical literalism became another entry point into Catholicism.
Particularly, he cites the Catholic doctrine of the church, doctrine of Communion and what the Bible teaches about unity.
He explains his embrace of the Catholic teaching of transubstantiation — the belief that the bread and wine of Communion when blessed by the priest become the literal body and blood of Christ.
“The consecration of the bread and the wine of the host — and that through a miracle it becomes what Jesus said it was, the body and blood of Christ and the soul and divinity of Christ. So it’s the real presence of Christ or as Thomas Aquinus called it philosophically ‘transubstantiation.’ But you know in common layman’s terms it becomes Jesus the real presence.”
By contrast, he says, “Baptists believe in the real absence of Christ. That is, they believe it’s a memorial. They believe it’s a symbol, that it’s also a show or theater. … So it’s … not the presence of Christ in any way.”
Johnson contends for the first 1,500 years of church history, “no one even presented that case. They certainly didn’t present the Baptist case of no presence and the real absence, and they didn’t even argue for a spiritual presence of Christ.”
Believing the elements of Communion become the literal presence of Christ is the most logical conservative viewpoint, he says. “I just don’t see any way if you believe the Bible is the word of God, if you believe it’s inerrant and infallible, there’s just no other way to take all this. … If you’re going with the text and if you’re going with the church fathers, there’s really no other alternative.”
Another turning point for Johnson, he says, was attending a Protestant church where the Lord’s Supper was presented as an optional add-on for those who wanted it at the end of the service and he was given a “cuplet” with a cheap cracker and juice.
What he was given was “gluten free and grace free,” he says. “It’s alcohol free and it’s atonement free, and the real absence of Christ in contrast to the real presence became vivid for me because if you don’t believe this is the body and blood of the Lord, it ceases to be very important.”
In the video, Johnson also explains how he came to understand papal authority as biblical and how he sees the Catholic Church standing against secular culture.