A customer service representative can be central to carrying out a religious organization’s mission in the same way a pastor is, a federal appeals court ruled, shielding the employer from federal nondiscrimination statutes.
World Vision had rescinded a customer service job offer to a woman, Aubry McMahon, after learning she was in a same-sex marriage, and she sued over discrimination.
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that World Vision was exempt from the woman’s bias suit, reversing a district judge’s ruling in 2023.
Customer service reps “are World Vision’s ‘voice,’” the court ruled. The three-judge panel, all appointed by Democratic presidents, was unanimous.
The case has implications for how courts handle the tensions between nondiscrimination protections for sexual orientation and religious organizations enforcing certain sexual ethics among their employees.
Many Christian organizations were following the outcome of the World Vision case, with denominations like The Foursquare Church, the Southern Baptist Convention (via the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission), and the Seventh-day Adventists filing briefs in support of World Vision.
The appeals court ruled that the “ministerial exception,” which shields religious organizations from lawsuits over their hiring and firing of faith leaders, applied to McMahon, the prospective employee. But it said nondiscrimination laws still applied to all “non-ministerial” positions at World Vision.
The court cited World Vision’s belief that “corporate and individual behavior witnesses, reflects, and testifies about what we believe as a ministry and as individual believers” and that staff should “[f]ollow the living Christ, individually and corporately in faith and conduct, publicly and privately, in accord with the teaching in His Word (the Bible).”
The organization has written standards of conduct that say biblical sexuality is expressed “solely within a faithful marriage between a man and a woman,” though in 2014 it briefly said it would hire employees in same-sex marriages before reversing its position.
In the ruling the court cited recordings of calls between World Vision customer service reps and donors to show how the reps “perform key religious functions central to World Vision’s mission.”
In one call, a donor talked to a rep about how a Zimbabwean teenager the donor had sponsored for nine years was doing during the COVID-19 pandemic, and then the donor and the rep prayed together for the donor’s family.
“What’s important is that the court really grasped the key role that donor relations in particular plays in connection to advancing the mission of organizations like World Vision,” said John Melcon, an attorney with Taft law firm who handles religious employment cases and worked on one of the amicus briefs in this case. “I think the decision will have positive implications in terms of the application of the ministerial exception to donor- and supporter-facing roles in the ministry context.”
McMahon’s attorney Michael Subit called the ruling “a small tear in the fabric of anti-discrimination law” but said that religious organizations could “try to expand it to a giant hole,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Last year another appeals court, the Fourth Circuit, ruled that a Catholic school was shielded under the ministerial exception from a discrimination lawsuit over the firing of a teacher.
These cases are bubbling up in higher courts now because in 2020, the US Supreme Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County that Title VII, the nondiscrimination section of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, applies to gender identity and sexual orientation.
Title VII has an exemption for religious employers to hire based on beliefs, but courts have so far dodged the question of whether that exemption applies to all employees or just the ones that fit the “ministerial” role.
“Courts haven’t really come to a consensus on that,” said Melcon. “But [this ruling] is still a great ministerial-exception ruling.”
But the court put limits on who counts under the ministerial exception.
“A religious employer’s universal requirement that its employees help carry out the organization’s religious mission or live consistently with the organization’s religious values cannot be enough to qualify for the ministerial exception,” Ninth Circuit judge Richard Tallman wrote for the court.
He got more specific: “Secretaries, accountants, and custodians at World Vision … would not qualify for the ministerial exception because, unlike [customer service representatives], they are not charged with conveying the organization’s message to its donors.”
Religious freedom attorneys had been optimistic about the Ninth Circuit taking up the case because the court has a recent track record of rulings in favor of religious organizations, like a major 2023 ruling siding with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Attorneys from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty argued the case for World Vision.
The ministerial exception has been applied to non-Christian faiths as well, like a Zen-center staffer and an inspector for Jewish dietary laws.
The list of religious organizations that filed amicus briefs on the side of World Vision was long: Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Samaritan’s Purse, Colson Center for Christian Worldview, Moody Bible Institute, Summit Ministries, Christian Legal Society, Accord Network, Cru, Christian Medical & Dental Associations, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, Islam and Religious Freedom Action Team of the Religious Freedom Institute, Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty, The Navigators, National Religious Broadcasters, the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, Focus on the Family, The Master’s University and Seminary, Tyndale House Ministries, and Young Life, among others.
