Baptists have historically refused creeds on principle. The refusal follows from two convictions the tradition holds tightly: that every believer answers to God directly, without a church standing between, and that each congregation governs itself and cannot be bound by the vote of any body above it. A confession, on that reading, may describe what a group of churches happen to agree on, but it cannot be imposed, and the preamble of the Baptist Faith and Message says as much in its own voice. It calls the statement a consensus of opinion, denies it any authority over conscience, and states that any body adopting it is free to revise it.
What happened after 2000 is why the document is argued about rather than merely read. Trustees of the convention's agencies began requiring employees, faculty and appointed missionaries to affirm the new statement, and a number of long-serving missionaries declined and left their posts rather than sign. Moderates who had already withdrawn to form the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in 1991 pointed to the requirement as proof of what they had left over. Defenders answered that a voluntary body may set the terms on which it employs and sends people, and that asking an agency's own staff to agree with the agency is not the same as binding a congregation or a conscience.
The dispute has not resolved, and it is a genuinely Baptist one rather than an argument imported from outside: both sides appeal to the same principle of the free church and reach opposite conclusions about what it permits.