Surprising? Perhaps not. In 2015, reactionary Christians are not only still preaching female submission but have hardened their stance in recent times. Southern Baptist minister Louis LoBue of Massachusetts holds up a sign showing how he defines marriage. Credit:Reuters One example. In 2012 the Anglican Diocese of Sydney – which is every bit as conservative as the Southern Baptists in the US – brought out its own prayer book. (The 1995 prayer book used by other Australian Anglicans is too liberal; the Sydney Diocese won't even authorise itsuse in Sydney churches.) The new book introduces a marriage service in which the bride is required to promise that she will submit to her husband. Yes, submit. And there is more. The husband is asked to promise he will "love and cherish" his wife, but she is asked to "love and respect" him. These promises are not only very different from the equal promises bride and bridegroom make in the 1995 Australian Anglican prayer book, and indeed the marriage services of other Christian churches around the world. They are also more conservative than the promises set out in the 16th-century Anglican prayer book, the first prayer book in English and the forerunner of all modern Anglican liturgies. Brides promised obedience but not submission in the 1550s.

And while promising wifely obedience was never acceptable, it is several degrees less offensive than submission. Obedience means doing what we are told to do in a specific instance by someone in authority – for example, a policeman on point duty. Submitting means an attitude of complete, ongoing unquestioning obedience in any and all situations, as in a totalitarian state. That is how marriage is portrayed by those who promote wifely submission in the 21st century – it is a totalitarian state where the wife offers complete, ongoing, unquestioning obedience. This wifely submission should be "voluntary, intelligent and willing" because "God's purposes for humanity include complementary relationships between the sexes", the Sydney lobby group Equal But Different maintains. This "complementarity" (read: "difference"), supposedly mandated by the Bible, is required not only in marriage but also in the church, meaning women cannot be priests or bishops. Only men can provide "authoritative teaching and pastoral oversight". Strange that it seems that God wants this pattern of submission only in marriage and the church. A woman can still apparently be the sovereign, the governor-general, the prime minister. But then, church marriage and church polity are the only two areas churches can still control. Female submission to men is a highly dangerous doctrine, and as Jimmy Carter pointed out in his 2009 article, has been used across the centuries, by many religions, and still today, to excuse violence against women, rape, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and slavery. In Australia it justifies domestic violence. Men who beat their wives and partners and former partners do so because they believe they have proprietary rights over them, and so can force women to submit to them and punish them when they don't.

There is continuing resistance to women in leadership across the board. Look at the despicable way our one and only female prime minister Julia Gillard was treated. This year there was a flurry of articles in the press and on social media over claims that the so-called Christian teaching on wifely submission was in some cases being used as a blueprint for domestic violence. Some clergy, it was claimed, were telling abused wives that they had to stay with their husbands because of the few biblical verses requiring their submission. Incidentally, no reputable biblical scholar today will have a bar of this interpretation of the Bible. Those verses about marital behaviour were related to the 1st-century social context in which they were written, they argue. They have as much relevance today as the Old Testament rules against tattoos, eating shellfish, or the death penalty for cursing your parents. I suspect there is more going on about the place of women in society than simply the archaic and decidedly un-Christian views of some churches. It seems possible that domestic violence is actually increasing. There is continuing resistance to women in leadership across the board. Look at the despicable way our one and only female prime minister Julia Gillard was treated. And there are just two women in the federal cabinet because, apparently, no other women have the necessary "merit". Women have been effectively free to pursue any role or career they wanted only since they gained control over their fertility with the introduction of "the pill" in the 1960s. That change represented the overturning of millennia of enforced female subservience because of the demands of child-bearing and child-rearing.

It is perhaps not really surprising that we are witnessing a male backlash across the board. No wonder Jimmy Carter's expose has sparked renewed interest. Dr Muriel Porter is the author of Sex, Power and the Clergy. Her most recent book is A New Exile? The future of Anglicanism.