Hiring the like-minded

In a unanimous decision Tuesday, a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled that a Washington state homeless ministry has a constitutional right to employ only like-minded individuals.

Circuit Judge Patrick Bumatay wrote the opinion for the three-judge panel, which included appointees of President Donald Trump and former President Bill Clinton. Bumatay concluded that the church autonomy doctrine protects Yakima Union Gospel Mission’s ability to hire co-religionists for non-ministerial roles if the organization says its sincerely held religious beliefs require it.

“If state law were to prevent religious institutions from employing only co-religionists, those institutions could be forced to hire employees who openly flout and disagree with their religious principles,” wrote Bumatay. “This, the First Amendment doesn’t tolerate.”

Concerned that Washington state officials would enforce an anti-discrimination law against it, Union Gospel sued the Washington attorney general and Washington State Human Rights Commission in March 2023. But the litigation proved to be a wild ride.

A federal district court dismissed the case for lack of standing in September 2023, but an appeals court panel reinstated it in June 2024. The district court then sided with the mission in November 2024, blocking the state from applying the law against the mission. The state appealed.

Union Gospel serves everyone with its homeless shelter, religious programs for addiction recovery, health clinics, and meal services, Bumatay wrote in his opinion. But it expects all of its employees to agree with and live according to the mission’s Christian beliefs and practices, including on marriage and sexuality.

The Yakima-based mission’s Biblical belief that sexual conduct is reserved for marriage between one man and one woman put the ministry at odds with the Washington Law Against Discrimination, which penalizes employers for violating discrimination rules that include sexual orientation or gender identity. And while the law contains a religious exemption, a 2021 Washington Supreme Court ruling limited the exemption to “ministers”—meaning those employees serving core religious functions.

But as Bumatay noted, that conclusion by the state’s highest court did not trump the First Amendment’s protection of church autonomy. He wrote that the state Supreme Court’s ruling was an outlier considering the breadth of religious exemptions in other state anti-discrimination laws and in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

“[A loss for Union Gospel] would mean that the State could interfere with a religious mission and drive it from the public sphere,” wrote Bumatay. “Such a result is contrary to the First Amendment’s principles.”

Washington state officials had argued that, since they had agreed not to retroactively enforce the anti-discrimination law against the Union Gospel for past hiring, the ministry suffered no injury—and thus had no standing to sue. Bumatay dismissed that line of reasoning. “While we may take the State at its word that it won’t sue Union Gospel for hiring its IT and operations support roles, the State has not confirmed what it will do if Union Gospel seeks to fill its cashiers, cooks, or nurses roles with members of its religion,” he wrote.

Bumatay noted that Tuesday’s ruling was based on the church autonomy doctrine, not the ministerial exception. The ministerial exception, he wrote, is narrower in that it only covers employees who serve “vital religious functions.” Yet it is broader in that it protects the religious employer from lawsuits based on the non-hiring or firing of an employee for any reason—not just employment actions taken because of the employer’s religious beliefs.

“Given the central role they provide in shaping a religious organization’s mission and character, any government interference into who may serve as a ‘minister’ is an inherently religious undertaking barred by the First Amendment,” he wrote. “That’s why the ministerial exception does not require any additional showing that the employment action was ‘made for a religious reason.’”

But while it may cover all of a religious organization’s employees, the church autonomy doctrine protects employment decisions that relate to non-ministerial employees only if they are rooted in sincerely held religious beliefs. Bumatay added that the ruling did not address the effect of the doctrine on nonreligious entities run by religious organizations, like hospitals or commercial businesses.

For Jeremiah Galus, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, those qualifications do not mar a resounding victory for churches and religious nonprofits.

“Most religious institutions that I’m aware of have no problem abiding by these employment nondiscrimination laws,” Galus said. “The question becomes, ‘What happens if a law is drafted in a way that would interfere with our ability to apply our religious beliefs and religious code of conduct to our employees?’—which is something that virtually all religious institutions do.”

The question of hiring decisions regarding non-ministerial employees has come up before multiple courts, but the 9th Circuit is the first to rule directly on the issue.

In August, a different panel of the 9th Circuit ruled unanimously in favor of Christian relief agency World Vision’s right to rescind an employment offer to an applicant who was in a same-sex relationship. Yet the ruling only protected hiring decisions for positions covered by the ministerial exception.

Just months earlier, in January 2025, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the right of New York pregnancy centers to hire only those who share their pro-life, religious values, although it didn’t base its ruling on the church autonomy doctrine.

But church autonomy is at the heart of oral arguments scheduled for mid-March before the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists v. Horton, the court will consider whether the Maryland Fair Employment Practices Act’s religious exemption allows Seventh-day Adventist organizations to hire only those who share their beliefs. As in Washington, that state’s highest court narrowly construed the law’s religious exemption to cover only employees who serve in certain roles vital to an organization’s mission.

In 2022, the Supreme Court declined on technical grounds an opportunity to rule in a similar case involving non-ministerial employees at Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission. But Justice Samuel Alito warned then that “the day may soon come when we must decide whether the autonomy guaranteed by the First Amendment protects religious organizations’ freedom to hire co-religionists without state or judicial interference.”

Should the state appeal Tuesday’s ruling, that day may yet come. The state has not indicated if it would seek review by the full 9th Circuit or the Supreme Court.