At the 2021 annual meeting of the SBC, messengers passed a resolution regarding clergy sex abuse, which said in part, “Resolved that the messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention believe that any person who has committed sexual abuse is permanently disqualified from holding the office of pastor.”
In a phone call with ChurchLeaders, Bumgardner clarified that it was not the intention of BNG to call Buck’s pastoral qualifications into question in light of the admission that he had spoken to his wife in a way that was “certainly abusive,” but to highlight that the SBC has not fleshed out policy guidelines on abuse of a non-sexual nature.
“We don’t know what the position of the messengers is in other forms of abuse,” Bumgardner said. He further expressed that BNG had held the draft “for at least two weeks,” because they wanted to respect Jennifer Buck’s privacy.
Bumgardner said that BNG chose not to report on the leaked draft until Buck herself went public with her story and consulted with abuse advocates before publishing the article, which has received some support.
“[Thanks] to @baptist_news for pointing out: spousal abuse can be deadly. THAT is the message anyone in an abusive relationship needs to hear. First priority is safety,” said abuse advocate Christa Brown, who referred to Jennifer Buck’s story about staying in her marriage despite verbal abuse as a “troubling” and “possibly dangerous message.”
Nevertheless, BNG has faced multiple calls to take down the article, something that it has declined to do.
In an editorial, BNG executive director Mark Wingfield defended the report as newsworthy given the current milieu in the SBC regarding abuse. He also stressed that BNG did not publish any details from Jennifer Buck’s story that she did not already make public, even though that “would have been a more sensational story.”
“By the way, where is the outcry against whoever it was who created burner email and Twitter accounts in order to threaten Tom Buck with publication of his wife’s own words,” Wingfield wrote. “And for that matter, where is the outcry against Tom Buck’s long-term pattern of angry tweets against all manner of other people?”
In response to Bumgardner’s BNG report, Jennifer Buck tweeted, “This article is filled with lies. They are twisting partial truth to use me to attack my husband for their political purposes.”
“This is what they truly think of people who they even believe might be abuse victims. They are little more than pawns in their political games,” Buck said. She later tweeted, “There is nothing I’ve experienced in my entire life that I feel more abused by than what the SBC leaders are doing to me and my husband. These people are wicked!”
On April 12, Tom Buck shed more light on the leaked draft of his wife’s article in a Twitter thread, wherein he said that he received a call on April 1 from someone who told him “the powers that be in the SBC” were “shopping” the draft around in an attempt to silence his voice.
Buck went on to say that while he would not be speaking about the matter any further until Holy Week is over, “there is much more to the story that must now be revealed. The important details are not those that come from the unpublished words of my wife’s rough draft, but those that will be released soon to shed light on the darkness that was behind this political hit job.”