Big-name Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leader Richard Land had some sad news to share with the flocks last month: Jerry Johnson, a die-hard SBC culture warrior who held important leadership roles within the denomination, had converted to Catholicism. More than that, though, Richard Land had some opinions about this conversion. As he shared them, though, he revealed some of the biggest dealbreakers about his entire ideology. Today, I’ll show you what he said and why it matters to anyone concerned about evangelicals’ growing desperation to take control of Americans’ lives.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 3/20/2026. They’re both available now!)
SITUATION REPORT: Richard Land laments an absolutely impossible conversion
While I was out sick, I noticed a post by Richard Land over at Baptist Press. This is the official website of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). The denomination’s leaders use it as a way to tell the flocks what’s happening lately and how to feel about it.
In this case, they allowed Richard Land, once an absolutely huge name within the SBC, to express his sadness and shock over the conversion of a fellow denominational leader, Jerry Johnson, to Catholicism. Johnson offers his testimony on YouTube in various places, including here:
The absolute shade Land throws at Johnson in his post is hilarious to behold, though it is very subtle. But I see why he needed to write this post.
For an evangelical culture warrior, this defection from the tribe is unthinkable. It’s impossible. There’s no way whatsoever it could have happened.
And yet, it moves (as Galileo is said to have quietly insisted). In more modern parlance: That’s sure exactly what did happen. Worse, it keeps happening!
Richard Land clearly wants to prevent it from happening again.
Today, I’ll show you how to read between the lines of this post, and then we will explore why Richard Land’s so concerned about evangelical-to-Catholic conversions.
Everyone, meet Richard Land
First, though, let’s meet the major players in today’s drama.
When we talk about SBC leaders, we have to talk also about their factional leanings. Richard Land and Jerry Johnson are—or at least both were at one point—part of what I call the Old Guard faction. Land himself was a proud veteran of the SBC’s civil war crisis, the Conservative Resurgence, that led his faction’s spiritual daddies to full ownership of the SBC. Johnson, like fellow Old Guard leader Al Mohler, was a disciple of the movement.
Unfortunately for the Old Guard, right now they’re fighting again for ownership of the SBC. Their main enemies are what I call the Pretend Progressives. Mainly, the war concerns how beholden the SBC will be to sex abuse victims and how far the SBC should go in making churches safe for everyone. The Old Guard thinks the answers to those questions is “not even a little” and “completely not our problem.” Meanwhile, the Pretend Progressives make a lot of noise about the situation. This strategy wins them a lot of votes from the flocks. But they never actually do much at all about it.
Now, let’s meet our two Old Guard leaders. We’ll start with Richard Land (born 1946).
From 1988 until 2013, Richard Land led the SBC’s Ethic and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). The ERLC functions as the SBC’s front line in the culture wars. Its people lobby politicians and speak publicly about culture-war topics of concern to right-wing Christians.
Alas, Richard Land lost that extremely cushy gig in 2013. The year before, he got caught plagiarizing someone else’s racist screed for his SBC-sponsored radio show, Richard Land Live. However, he landed very softly into a new position as president of Southern Evangelical Seminary, a hard-right religious college. There, he co-taught an ethics class along with an SBC leader who’d recently been fired after deliberately mishandling a sex assault on his campus, Paige Patterson.
Since retiring from that school in 2021, he’s popped up from time to time. Notably, in the past couple of years he’s shown up to fight for the validity and legitimacy of the ERLC itself. His former SBC colleagues still very clearly like this guy, and he still has pull among them. One major show of that affection is allowing him to contribute posts to Baptist Press at all.
On that note, do not miss his 2013 attempt to beat the racism allegations with a Baptist Press post. In it, he writes about how much he liked a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His byline mentions his previous role at the ERLC, but not why he lost it.
(If I wrote a modern version of This Present Darkness with these details for its villain, everyone would accuse me of being mean.)
And now, everyone, meet Jerry Johnson
Jerry Johnson, born in 1964, is young enough to be Richard Land’s son. After a fervent childhood with a deeply religious family, he attended Criswell College in the 1980s—where Land worked as an academic officer at the time. Patterson taught there too, at one point. Together, these two leaders turned Criswell into a boot camp for future Old Guard leaders like Jerry Johnson.
Johnson found Criswell College and this boot camp environment at a very pivotal time in his own life. What he found there helped him drill down hard on rightwing, hardline evangelical beliefs—so much so that someone referred to him as the spiritual grandson of the college’s namesake!
Once he graduated, he became a board member of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS). This was in the 1990s, toward the tail end of the Conservative Resurgence. In 1993, Al Mohler became the school’s president, while Johnson continued to serve as a board member. Johnson pastored, kept rising through the ranks at the denominational level, and cultivated a good reputation and connections among his peers and Old Guard leaders.
In 2002, Mohler hired Johnson to lead SBTS’s undergraduate school.
But Johnson kept on climbing the ranks. The very next year, in 2003 and at age 39, Johnson became the president and CEO of Criswell’s Center for Biblical Studies. At the time, Al Mohler and other Old Guard leaders showered him with compliments for his fervor and his dedication to SBC doctrinal stances. Johnson resigned the post in 2008 over governance conflicts.
In 2013, he became the president of the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB). He’d resign in 2019 amid growing concerns over the group’s finances.
I’m telling you all this so you know this guy was the real deal, at least in SBC terms. He was fervent, dedicated, and tightly associated with other big names in his faction. Most of all, Richard Land felt this guy was more than just a kindred spirit: Johnson was like a spiritual disciple of his own. The two names can be found linked in multiple places online, and they maintained active correspondence for decades (see p. 23 of this PDF).
But recently, something big changed for Jerry Johnson.
He felt the call of Rome.
The conversion of Jerry Johnson
Literalists tend to have an extremely high need for certainty and authoritarian backing. In other words, they want to feel utterly, completely certain of their beliefs, and they want the highest authority they can get confirming those beliefs. They think literalism will give them both. It tells them that the Bible is completely inerrant in every way, and that every verse of it is literally and objectively true. (Yes, even the weird bits, like using sticks to influence sheep breeding in Genesis 30.)
Unfortunately for Christians, their religion doesn’t have any real certainty to give them. Nobody can agree on the Bible’s meanings and commands. We barely even understand what most of it even says in modern languages. So literalists often fall into the orbit of whoever can sound the most certain and grab the most authority in their milieu.
For Jerry Johnson, literalism had ruled his life for almost the entirety of it. He really wanted to believe only the most correct doctrines possible, and to Jesus his way through life in the most Jesusy way he could.
Like all too many evangelical literalists, then, Johnson stumbled across Catholicism—which positions itself as the most certain flavor of, and the highest authority in, Christianity. He first began investigating Catholicism around 2017 or 2018, it sounds like. Then, he likely began formal conversion proceedings last year—for adults, the process usually take less than a year. Johnson formally announced his conversion in late January 2026. It sounds like he’s become a tradcath, one of the new mostly-American hardliner literalists in Catholicism.
No public evidence suggests he talked to anyone else about these decisions. Indeed, Richard Land sounds gobsmacked by the news in his Baptist Press post.
And according to his beliefs, he should be.
This defection shouldn’t even have been possible.
The impossible defection of Jerry Johnson
In evangelicalism, leaders teach that nobody who knows and embraces “the full gospel” would ever possibly reject it. They get this idea from Bible verses like 1 John 2:19:
They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.
Any ex-Christian is long familiar with this verse. I’ve seen so, so many reactions to defections and deconversions using this one Bible verse. Evangelicals constantly accuse us of not having really believed, or of not having believed exactly the correct doctrines somehow. They cannot accept that someone could believe the same things and perform the same devotions as they do, and yet can still come to the conclusion that none of it’s based in reality. Nope, that’s not possible!
In the case of most ex-Christians, our accusers (hey, isn’t that Satan’s job?!?) don’t know us. We don’t live public lives. Our beliefs and convictions were rarely ever a matter of public record. Most of us weren’t even active on social media. For me, for example, I deconverted before the consumer internet was even a thing.
But nobody can say that about Jerry Johnson. Everything he believed, everything, all of it, has been public record for decades. Not a single Christian can look at Jerry Johnson and say that somehow, he must have Jesused incorrectly. Somehow, he got something very wrong. He must have.
Nope. Whatever Richard Land says to try to invalidate this conversion, he cannot rely on false accusations about the man’s beliefs and credentials. This guy believed in completely all the right things, and he still defected.
This defection has to be addressed. It can’t just be ignored. Not in the SBC.
And who better to do it than Richard Land, a veteran officer of the Conservative Resurgence itself?
Throwing shade at an impossible defection
Here’s where we come into the story, just in time for Richard Land to try to invalidate Jerry Johnson’s defection. As I said, the shade is subtle, but it’s definite.
First, he gives a short biography of Johnson. Then, he relates the reaction of his fellow evangelicals: “I was immediately inundated with phone calls and emails expressing shock, hurt, bewilderment and some anger.”
(Anger? Land never says why, but it’s a curious emotion to encounter here. Could it have come from one of the many SBC leaders Johnson accused of incorrect Jesusing back at SBTS during the Conservative Resurgence? Land never says who was angry, unfortunately.)
And now, the money shot:
Personally, as a sola fide, sola Scriptura Southern Baptist, I could never, even on pain of imprisonment or death, do what Dr. Johnson has done.
My goodness, that is quite a mouthful. Are you receiving what he’s sending? But nobody imprisoned Johnson, nor threatened him with death. Catholics stopped doing that a while ago (when secular governments forced them to stop). Johnson also held the Calvinist beliefs sola fide (faith alone) and sola Scriptura (Bible alone) Southern Baptist, and he still freely left it behind to become Catholic.
It really sounds like Land is saying that his beliefs are so intense and so correct that he could never ever possibly abandon them. But nothing stops Land from ad hoc rationalizing Catholicism as a far greater authority source than the SBC. The only thing that separates these two men are some smells and bells.
Possibly the worst part, ft. the Doctrinal Yardstick
At the end, after having told Jerry Johnson that not even prison and the threat of execution could possibly lead him to join him, Land concludes thusly:
So I defend to the death Dr. Johnson’s right to make the decision he has made, and I defend to the death my right to vigorously disagree with his choice and to pray for his return to the faith we once so joyously held in common.
It sounds nice, but it reveals one of the biggest dealbreakers in Christianity:
All Richard Land can do in response to the news is “vigorously disagree” and ask Jesus to magically change Johnson’s mind again.
In other words, he has no objective way to invalidate it. He has to go for broke on emotional manipulation, and he knows it.
Why Richard Land’s reaction post is important to us
Nothing objective exists in Christianity. All anyone has are notoriously subjective interpretations of the Bible. If two Christians disagree, there’s no way whatsoever for either of them to win on evidence alone. They’ll have to argue very persuasively on emotional bases, or maybe pull rank on each other. But reality won’t help them win at all.
A lot of hay gets made of evangelicals converting to Catholicism. Definitely, some are (and a few Catholics go the opposite direction). However, it’s not enough to make any kind of difference to either branch of Christianity. It’s a non-starter of an issue for either group.
All that’s happening here is that one tribalistic group lost a high-profile member, while the other gained him. Any one individual Christian’s change of mind isn’t a win or loss in the overall culture wars.
But this time, the loss involves someone who very obviously defies the standard invalidation model evangelicals like to use. They can’t accuse him of not having been a TRUE CHRISTIAN™.
And that’s exactly why Richard Land has to land on pure emotional manipulation as a response—and a blatantly obvious kind of emotional manipulation at that. If he had evidence, he’d already have used it. But he doesn’t, so he does this instead.
NEXT UP: Evangelical leaders are still trying to sell the notion that anyone rejecting their sales attempts is really offended at “the gospel,” not their behavior. See you soon! <3
Please support my work!
Thanks for reading, and thanks for being part of our community! Here are some ways you can support my work:
Endnote
Guess who’s back with a brand-new rap:
0 Comments