By telling America's wives to "submit graciously" to the leadership of their husbands, Southern Baptists have set off a controversy that has raged from neighbourhood pastors all the way to the Ivy League.
President Bill Clinton had his press spokesman report that he would bring the idea up with his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, famed for her outspokenness.
The Southern Baptist spokesman Mr Herb Hollinger said the church was receiving a mostly positive response to its statement but admitted that "we're getting a lot of flak from feminist folks".
At issue was a passage in the church's amended statement of belief passed last Tuesday at its convention in Salt Lake City, which reads: "A wife . . . has the Godgiven responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation. A wife has to submit herself graciously to the servant-leadership of her husband, even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ."
Mr David Bartlett, the associate dean at Yale's Divinity School, said the change in creed, "represents one more attempt by conservative Americans to try to find clear solid standards they can hold to when culture is shifting in all kinds of ways that aren't easily comprehensible".
Based on St Paul's Letter to the Ephesians, the Baptist passage "disregards 2,000 years of evolution of faith and the roles people have grown into," said Mr Robert Bock, pastor of the First Christian Church of North Hollywood.
"How does that apply to women ministers, to women bishops, to single mothers raising families on their own who have to be mother and father?" he asked. "There's a whole gamut of responsibilities that were not really prevalent in Paul's time when he addressed this to new Christians in a new faith in a new situation."
The Rt Rev John Shelby Spong, the Episcopal bishop of Newark, New Jersey, and an outspoken liberal churchman, was even more scathing in his appraisal.
"The Bible also says the earth is flat, epilepsy is caused by demon possession, slavery is a legitimate institution, women are the property of men and God orders the people of Israel to go to war and kill every man, woman and child from the nation of Amalekite," he said.