“Religious organizations must be able to hire employees who share their doctrinal commitments, including how their faith is practiced,” Miles Mullin, the ERLC’s acting president, told Baptist Press. “Otherwise, those commitments mean nothing, and the very nature of the organization is undermined.”
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which also filed an amicus brief in the case, said the decision could be detrimental for church-state separation.
“This case is part of a dangerous trend,” Rachel Laser, Americans United for Separation of Church and State president and CEO, told Religion News Service in a statement. “A network of conservative legal activists and religious organizations is urging courts to expand a narrow, commonsense rule — meant to allow houses of worship to select clergy according to their faith traditions — into a broad license to discriminate and circumvent civil rights laws. If we want to protect workers from discrimination, we need a national recommitment to the separation of church and state.”
The appeals court said customer service representatives at World Vision have “vital religious duties,” citing a 2020 Supreme Court ruling in Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, in which the high court carved out a broad ministerial exception to workplace discrimination rules that allows religious schools to include lay teachers as among those subject to exemption from civil rights laws.
The appellate court noted that neither party in the World Vision case disputed the religious nature of the charity. Tallman wrote the organization has an employee guidebook called the “Orange Book: Living Out Our Values” that discusses the ministry’s focus on prayer as well as “Standards of Conduct” that prohibit, among other things, “sexual conduct outside the Biblical covenant of marriage between a man and a woman.” Employment eligibility includes adhering to those standards.
The court rejected McMahon’s arguments that religious elements of the role were optional or equally applied to all World Vision staffers. Its ruling cited testimony and recordings of customer service calls that demonstrated the religious nature of the CSR job.
“In one call, a CSR and a current donor discuss how COVID-19 has impacted a 15-year-old in Zimbabwe that the donor has sponsored for the past nine years before praying together for the donor’s family during the pandemic,” Tallman wrote.
In another instance, after a discussion about clean water and sponsored children, a donor asked “the CSR to pray for his brother, who is ‘close to meeting God,’ and the donor puts the call on speakerphone so his wife can pray with the donor and the representative.”
Tallman noted that a ministerial exception may not apply to all World Vision employees.
“Secretaries, accountants and custodians at World Vision, despite having the same religious obligations to attend chapel and bear witness to Jesus Christ, would not qualify for the ministerial exception because, unlike CSRs, they are not charged with conveying the organization’s message to its donors — a role ‘vital’ to World Vision’s central mission,” he wrote.
In 2014, World Vision announced a short-lived policy that permitted employees to be in a same-sex marriage. Within 48 hours, after supporters threatened to pull donations, it reversed that policy.
This article originally appeared here.
