High Court Sides with Mich. Church in Employment Discrimination Case

by Jeremy Leaming

Daniel Mach, director of ACLU’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, wrote for ACSblog last summer about religious organizations' ability to shield themselves from anti-discrimination laws, citing their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. He asked whether religious institutions have a “categorical free pass to discriminate against certain people, regardless of the reason.”

Today, in what The New York Times’ Adam Liptak suggested may be the U.S. Supreme Court’s “most significant religious liberty decision in two decades,” sided with a Michigan church’s effort to avoid defending itself against an employment discrimination charge lodged by a teacher it had fired after she took sick leave, and for informing the church she planned to persue an employment discrimination claim against the church.

In Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a unanimous Court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. found, in this instance, that a so-called “ministerial exception,” provided the Redford, Mich. church protection from Cheryl Perich’s employment discrimination claim. (When Perich took sick leave to treat a disability, the church eventually hired a replacement teacher. After Perich presented church officials with a letter from her physician that she was cleared to start work again, church officials urged her to resign and except payment of a portion of her health insurance premiums. When she refused to do so, church officials informed her they were considering letting her go, and she responded by warning them she planned to lodge an employment discrimination complaint.)

Since the passage of the Civil Rights of 1964 and other employment discrimination laws, Roberts explained that the federal appeals courts “have uniformly recognized the existence of a ‘ministerial exception,’ grounded in the First Amendment, that precludes application of such legislation to claims concerning the employment relationship between a religious institution and its ministers.”

But in this case, the lower federal appeals court had concluded the ministerial exception did not apply here, noting that the large part of Perich’s duties with the church included teaching secular courses.

The Roberts Court, however, although not ready to apply a “rigid formula for deciding when an employee qualifies as a minister,” disagreed with the lower court, pointing to other circumstances in the case that said shielded the church from Perich’s employment discrimination claim. Roberts said the church “held Perich out as a minister …,” and “tasked her with performing that office ‘according to the Word of God and the confessional standards of the Evangelical Lutheran Church as drawn from the Sacred Scriptures.’”

Some civil liberties groups, however, argued that today’s high court opinion gives too much leeway to religious institutions to flout laws that apply to other nonreligious organizations.

In a press statement, the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said, “Blatant discrimination is a social evil we have worked hard to eradicate in the United States. I’m afraid the court’s ruling today will make it harder to combat.”

Lynn continued, “Clergy who are fired for reasons unrelated to matters of theology – no matter how capricious or venal those reasons may be – have just had the courthouse door slammed in their faces.”