A Religious Accommodation Claim May Be Based, in Part, on Non-Religious Terms.

In the context of religious exemptions to COVID vaccine mandates, several U.S. Courts of Appeals have addressed the standard by which a claim based on employee’s mingled personal/religious belief should be evaluated under Title VII. The latest of these rulings comes from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Title VII prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion, among other things, and requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations to resolve conflicts between an employee’s religious beliefs or practices and workplace policies or requirements, absent an undue hardship. In companion cases Passarella v. Aspirus, Inc. and Bube v. Aspirus Hospital, Inc., employees were denied their requests for exemptions from the employer’s vaccine mandate because the employer determined that their concerns were more rooted in safety than religion. They sued for failure to provide a reasonable accommodation, and their claims were dismissed by the federal district courts, one of which observed that “the use of religious vocabulary does not elevate a personal medical judgment to a matter of protected religion.”

On appeal, however, the Seventh Circuit reversed the district courts’ dismissals. In so doing, it referenced the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s COVID guidance as well as other precedent that “a religious objection to a workplace requirement may incorporate both religious and secular reasons.” With this ruling, it joined the Eighth and Sixth Circuits.

Notably, these decisions addressed the sufficiency of the employees’ claims at the beginning of the case, before discovery occurs. In order to survive a motion to dismiss, a plaintiff’s complaint must contain enough factual assertions, if assumed to be true, that will support a claim for relief under the applicable law (in this case, Title VII). As the Seventh Circuit observed, as long as an accommodation request can be read “as plausibly based in part on an aspect of the plaintiff-employee’s religious belief or practice, that is enough to survive a motion to dismiss.” Once discovery has concluded, however, the employer may be able to attack the sincerity of the professed religious belief, at which point the district court’s statement above may become more relevant.