He was educated at The King's School, Macclesfield and graduated from Owens College, Manchester, in 1894 with a Bachelor of Sciences degree in civil engineering and the geological prize.

His unconventional views on the war caused him to be refused employment as an army chaplain on active service but he officiated at a prisoner-of-war camp in his parish.

[2] His political views were unpopular but his hard work and pastoral skills led to him being appointed Dean of Manchester by Labour Party founder and then-prime minister Ramsay MacDonald in 1924.

He collected his articles in the book The Socialist Sixth of the World (Gollancz, 1939; published in the United States as Soviet Power in 1941), which included a preface by the renegade Brazilian Roman Catholic bishop Carlos Duarte Costa.

After Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, he supported the war; his MI5 file reports that it was still judged "undesirable for the Dean of Canterbury to be allowed to lecture to troops".

"[9] At the end of the war Johnson was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, in recognition of his "outstanding work as chairman of the joint committee for Soviet Aid", and in 1951 received the Stalin International Peace Prize.

In 1954, the Daily Sketch published a cartoon attacking Johnson, depicting him with devil horns and posing alongside black civil rights leaders Billy Strachan and Paul Robeson.

[6][11] According to Ferdinand Mount, "What infuriated his critics, from Gollancz on the left to Fisher on the right, was that there was no evidence that Johnson had made any but the most superficial study of the issues that he spouted on with such mellifluous certainty, from famines in the 1930s to germ warfare in Korea".

One year, Johnson put up a huge blue and white banner across the front of the Deanery which read "Christians Ban Nuclear Weapons".

"[2] His biographer Natalie K. Watson, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), wrote: "Communism, for Johnson, was not an anti-Christian force, but rather a natural result and a practical outworking of the Christian gospel.

[13] While maintaining his interest in Communist world developments, he engaged in psychical research and completed before his death his autobiography, Searching for Light (posthumously published in 1968).