A July 29 ruling by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago cautions employers about how they handle religious accommodation requests that they may view as more secular than religious in nature.
In Passarella and Dottenwhy v. Aspirus, Inc., the 7th Circuit ruled 2-1 to allow two former employees of Aspirus, a nonprofit healthcare system in Wisconsin, to go ahead with their claim that they were unlawfully denied a religious exemption from receiving the COVID-19 vaccine under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
“The fact that an accommodation request also invokes or, as here, even turns upon secular considerations, does not negate its religious nature,” the two majority judges emphasized.
In other words, “a religious objection to a workplace requirement may incorporate both religious and secular reasons,” the judges noted, agreeing with guidance from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Under Title VII, the controlling inquiry is “whether the employee plausibly based her vaccination exemption request at least in part on an aspect of her religious belief or practice,” the judges wrote. The plaintiffs met that standard here, they held.
In 2021, Aspirus, a nonprofit hospital system located in Wausau, Wisconsin, required all employees to be vaccinated against COVID, according to court documents. Per Aspirus policy, a medical surgery nurse and a pharmacy technician submitted requests for a religious exemption.
In their requests, they made statements connecting their objection to the vaccine to their Christian beliefs about the sanctity of the human body, court documents reflected. These statements were tied to their concern over the vaccine’s safety and potentially harmful effects, court records showed.
Aspirus rejected the requests and terminated their employment. They sued the employer for failing to accommodate their religious beliefs, allegedly in violation of Title VII.
A federal district court dismissed their complaint, but a split panel of the 7th Circuit reversed. The two-judge majority found they stated a cause of action for religious discrimination under Title VII and reinstated the lawsuit.
The decision, which covers employers in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, comes on the heels of a ruling by a federal district court in Ohio about a similar exemption request.
In that request, a sales rep cited Bible verses and expressed a religious concern about stem cells used to make the COVID vaccine. She also said she was concerned about the vaccine being “safe and effective.”
The case had to go to trial because the evidence raised a “quintessential” jury question over whether the request was based on sincerely held religious beliefs or on reasons that were “truly medical and masked by religious language,” the district court held.
The rulings suggest that lower courts may be taking a more lenient view of workplace religious accommodation requests, led by the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last year in Groff v. DeJoy.
In Groff, the justices unanimously overturned a decades-old, employer-favorable standard for proving “undue hardship” — the defense Title VII allows employers to assert to justify turning down a religious accommodation request.
The bar is much higher than what was previously expected, the justices held. Instead, to prove undue hardship, an employer must show the requested accommodation will impose a substantial burden on its business, they clarified.
Still, the answers to an individual case aren’t always clear-cut. Even judges can disagree on the outcome, as the dissenting judge did in the Aspirus case. The majority’s ruling goes “far beyond anything that Congress could have intended when it enacted Title VII,” she warned.
Against this backdrop, employers may need to follow a more rigorous process than they did before for handling religious accommodation requests, Duane Morris attorneys Jonathan Segal and Adam Brown suggested in an op-ed to HR Dive.
For instance, if an employer allows for secular or medical reasons what the employee is requesting for religious reasons, it should think hard before rejecting the request.
The EEOC has shown a willingness to take up the issue. In January, for example, Michigan-based Trinity Health Grand Rapids agreed to pay $50,000 to settle EEOC allegations it rejected an employee’s religious request to be exempted from its flu shot policy without giving the request proper consideration.
