The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that religious schools are allowed to fire religion teachers for any reason they wish, a major expansion of protections for religious institutions against nondiscrimination laws.
The case, Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, concerned the so-called ministerial exception, which exempts certain religious institutions from nondiscrimination laws. In a 7-2 decision with a majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court held that “the independence of religious institutions in matters of ‘faith and doctrine’ is closely linked to independence in what the Court has termed ‘matters of church government.’”
Because of these reasons, the court found that in the interests of protecting the First Amendment, it should stay out of employment disputes. Alito wrote in his opinion that while the decision does not mean that churches and religious institutions are exempt from all secular laws, it is not the government’s place to intrude upon their “autonomy with respect to internal management decisions that are essential to the institution’s central mission.”
The case, a consolidation of several lawsuits, concerned whether or not Catholic parochial schools can hire or fire religion teachers at will, regardless of considerations such as age, race, or gender. The Supreme Court in 2012 provided a similar exception to churches for the employment of ministers. That case, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, ruled that any a church can fire any “minister” without regard to discrimination laws.
Our Lady of Guadalupe focused on whether that exception could be extended to people who teach religion as well. In his opinion, Alito wrote that while Wednesday’s decision was markedly similar to that in Hosanna-Tabor, he hoped it would make clear that a “minister” should not solely be regarded as someone who has that title in a church hierarchy.
“If titles were all-important, courts would have to decide which titles count and which do not, and it is hard to see how that could be done without looking behind the titles to what the positions actually entail,” Alito wrote. “Moreover, attaching too much significance to titles would risk privileging religious traditions with formal organizational structures over those that are less formal.”
What really mattered in the case, Alito wrote, was expressing the understanding that the “very core” of the mission of religious schools was to teach young people “to live their faith.”
In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that he did not think it was appropriate for courts to be commenting on who does or does not qualify as a minister in intrachurch disputes.
“What qualifies as ‘ministerial’ is an inherently theological question, and thus one that cannot be resolved by civil courts through legal analysis,” he wrote.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joining, alleging that decision “risks upending antidiscrimination protections for many employees of religious entities.”
“Recently, this Court has lamented a perceived ‘discrimination against religion,'” Sotomayer wrote. “Yet here it swings the pendulum in the extreme opposite direction, permitting religious entities to discriminate widely and with impunity for reasons wholly divorced from religious beliefs. The inherent injustice in the Court’s conclusion will be impossible to ignore for long, particularly in a pluralistic society like ours.”
When the case was argued, religious liberty advocates compared its implications to those of Bostock v. Clayton County, a landmark case decided this term that requires that employers not discriminate against gay and transgender people.
[Read more: Supreme Court rules for Little Sisters of the Poor in long-running dispute over birth control mandate]
