Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1987

Corporation of the Presiding Bishop of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints v. Amos

483 U.S. 327 | 107 S. Ct. 2862 | 97 L. Ed. 2d 273 | 1987 U.S. LEXIS 2876 | 55 U.S.L.W. 5005

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Takeaway

In short, this case upheld Title VII's religious-employer exemption as applied to a church-run nonprofit activity because Congress could reduce intrusive governmental inquiries into a religious organization's mission without establishing religion.

Background

Mayson worked for approximately 16 years as an assistant building engineer and later building engineer at the Deseret Gymnasium in Salt Lake City. The nonprofit gymnasium was open to the public and operated by corporate entities affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1981, Mayson was discharged because he did not qualify for a temple recommend, a Church certificate requiring adherence to specified religious standards.

Mayson sued under Title VII, which generally prohibits employment discrimination based on religion. The Church-affiliated employers invoked § 702 of Title VII, as amended in 1972, which exempts religious corporations, associations, educational institutions, and societies from Title VII's ban on religious discrimination in employing persons to carry out their activities.

The District Court concluded that the gymnasium and Mayson's engineering job were secular rather than religious under a three-part test examining the entity's connection to the church, the activity's relationship to religious doctrine or church administration, and the employee's particular duties. Applying Lemon v. Kurtzman, the court found that § 702 had a permissible purpose but an unconstitutional primary effect when applied to secular activities. It entered judgment for Mayson, ordering reinstatement and backpay. After the United States intervened to defend the statute, the District Court reaffirmed its ruling. The Supreme Court reversed.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether applying § 702's religious-employment exemption to the secular nonprofit activities of a religious organization violates the Establishment Clause.

Holding

No. As applied to the nonprofit Deseret Gymnasium, § 702 is a permissible accommodation of religion and does not violate the Establishment Clause.

Reasoning

The Court applied the Lemon framework and held that Congress had a valid secular purpose: reducing significant governmental interference with religious organizations' ability to define and carry out their missions. Even if the Free Exercise Clause did not compel an exemption this broad, Congress could reasonably conclude that forcing churches to predict which activities a court would label “religious” would burden religious exercise and invite courts to misunderstand a church's beliefs and mission.

The exemption's principal effect was not governmental advancement of religion in the constitutionally forbidden sense. Although religious organizations may be better able to pursue their purposes because of § 702, the Establishment Clause does not invalidate every law that benefits religion. The relevant question is whether the government itself has sponsored, financially supported, or become actively involved in religious activity. On this record, any religious advancement through the gymnasium was attributable to the Church's own operation of the facility, not to government action.

The fact that § 702 gives a benefit specifically to religious organizations did not make it invalid. The Court rejected a rule requiring every religious accommodation to be bundled with comparable benefits for secular entities. When the government acts to lift a regulatory burden on religious exercise for a proper purpose, special treatment for religion can be a permissible accommodation rather than an establishment.

Section 702 also reduced, rather than created, excessive church-state entanglement. A narrower exemption would require courts to conduct intrusive, uncertain inquiries into whether particular activities and jobs are sufficiently religious. The contrast between the District Court's treatment of the Church's charitable Deseret Industries program and its gymnasium illustrated how fine and difficult that line could be. A categorical exemption for the religious organization's nonprofit activities avoided those inquiries.

Issue #2

Whether § 702 violates equal protection principles by allowing religious employers, but not secular employers, to make employment decisions based on religion.

Holding

No. Section 702 is rationally related to the legitimate objective of alleviating governmental interference with religious organizations' missions.

Reasoning

The Court distinguished Larson v. Valente, which requires strict scrutiny for laws that discriminate among religions. Section 702 instead provides a uniform benefit to religious organizations generally, is facially neutral among religions, and rests on the permissible objective of limiting government interference with religious exercise.

Because Congress had a legitimate purpose in relieving religious organizations from the difficult and intrusive task of proving that each activity was religious, the statutory classification needed only a rational relationship to that purpose. Applying the exemption to nonprofit activities of religious employers met that standard.

Concurrences

Justice Brennan

Reasoning

Justice Brennan agreed with the judgment only because the case involved a nonprofit organization. He stressed that any exemption from Title VII necessarily burdens employees' religious liberty by permitting an employer to condition a job, promotion, or continued employment on adherence to religious tenets. That coercive effect creates serious tension with individual freedom of conscience.

In Brennan's view, a religious organization ordinarily should be permitted to discriminate on religious grounds only in religious activities. Such discrimination can then be justified as protecting a religious community's authority to define itself and to require that those carrying out its mission share its commitments. Permitting discrimination in genuinely secular work, by contrast, gives religion economic leverage in the secular sphere and ordinarily goes beyond a permissible accommodation.

A case-by-case religious-versus-secular inquiry, however, would itself entangle courts in religious matters and chill religious organizations. Churches may hesitate to characterize activities as religious if they fear that a court will reject their understanding of their own mission. That risk is especially substantial for nonprofits, whose community-service activities may plausibly be understood as an expression of religious duty rather than as merely commercial enterprises.

Brennan concluded that a categorical exemption for nonprofit activities appropriately balances employees' religious freedom against church autonomy. Not every nonprofit activity is religious, but nonprofits are sufficiently likely to have a religious dimension that a categorical rule prevents excessive entanglement and chilling of religious expression.

Justice Blackmun

Reasoning

Justice Blackmun concurred in the judgment for the reasons set out principally in Justice O'Connor's separate opinion. He agreed that the majority's distinction between government “allowing” religion to advance itself and government “advancing” religion obscured more than it clarified.

He also emphasized that the decision did not resolve the constitutionality of § 702 as applied to for-profit activities of religious organizations.

Justice O'Connor

Reasoning

Justice O'Connor agreed with the result but criticized the majority's application of Lemon. She explained that a rigid application of Lemon could invalidate nearly every accommodation of religious exercise because an accommodation necessarily has a religious purpose and effect. Yet automatic deference to any asserted accommodation would effectively eliminate the Establishment Clause's independent constraint.

O'Connor rejected the majority's suggestion that the effects inquiry is satisfied simply because the government merely permits, rather than directly causes, religious advancement. In her view, the government advanced the Church's position by removing the generally applicable Title VII restriction that otherwise prevented the Church from conditioning Mayson's job on a temple recommend.

Her preferred inquiry asked whether the government acted to endorse religion and whether an objective observer, informed by the statute, its history, and its implementation, would perceive endorsement. A permissible accommodation must also lift an identifiable burden on religious exercise rather than merely confer an unjustified benefit on religion.

Applying that approach, O'Connor concluded that an objective observer would view the exemption for nonprofit activities as an accommodation. Nonprofit activities of religious organizations are sufficiently likely to be tied to religious missions that relieving them of the obligation to prove the religious character of each activity plausibly protects religious exercise. She reserved judgment, however, on the statute's application to activities conducted solely as for-profit enterprises.