Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Narrows Scope of Ministerial Exception

Seyfarth Synopsis: In the most recent decision to consider the intersection between religion and employment law, Massachusetts’s highest court in DeWeese-Boyd v. Gordon Coll., No. SJC-12988., 2021 WL 841932 (Mass. Mar. 05, 2021) narrowed the class of employees that may be considered a “minister” under the U.S. Supreme Court’s ministerial exception jurisprudence, thereby permitting the plaintiff’s gender discrimination claims against her religious employer to proceed to trial.  In so doing, the Supreme Judicial Court has set up what will no doubt be competing court decisions on how broadly to interpret the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decisions on the ministerial exception.

Ministerial Exception Background

As discussed here, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously recognized in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, 565 U.S. 171 (2012), that the First Amendment’s religious protections preclude certain employment discrimination claims brought against religious organizations because otherwise the federal government will be deemed to be interfering with the internal workings of religious organizations.  Under this “ministerial exception” doctrine, employees of a religious institution who are reasonably deemed to be “ministers” are excluded from suing their employers for employment discrimination claims.  In Hosanna-Tabor, the Court underscored the plaintiff’s ministerial title as a teacher, religious training, and her job duties that, taken together, reflected a role in conveying the message and mission of the religious institution.  Yet, the Supreme Court did not have an opportunity to define the outer limits of a “minister” beyond the narrow set of facts in Hosanna-Tabor until last year.

In Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, discussed more fully here, the U.S. Supreme Court analyzed the ministerial exception in the context of two elementary school teachers at Roman Catholic schools in the Los Angeles area who had filed separate federal employment discrimination suits against their respective religious employers.  The plaintiffs urged the Supreme Court to find that neither met the ministerial exception established in Hosanna-Tabor, because one of the teacher-plaintiffs did not have the formal title of “minister,” had limited formal religious training, and did not hold herself out publicly as a religious leader, and the other teacher lacked religious training and a ministerial background.

In a 7-2 opinion, the majority rejected the notion that an employee had to meet a rigid checklist to constitute a “minister.”  Rather, the Court held that “[w]hat matters, at bottom is what an employee does” and “that educating young people in their faith, inculcating its teachings, and training them to live their faith are responsibilities that lie at the very core of the mission of a private religious school.”  The Court noted that the teachers in Our Lady performed critical religious duties, including providing religion instruction, praying with the students, attending Mass with students, and preparing the children for other religious activities.  The Court also credited the schools’ own definition and explanation of the teachers’ respective roles as the schools saw the teachers as playing a vital part in carrying out the mission of the church.  The Court did not require any particularly rigid religious academic requirements for a teacher to fall within the ministerial exception, noting that “[t]eaching children in elementary school does not demand the same formal religious education as teaching theology to divinity students.  Elementary school teachers often teach secular subjects in which they have little if any special training.”  As such, the Supreme Court further clarified and broadened the reach of the ministerial exception, and foreclosed the employment actions.

DeWeese-Boyd Case Background

Plaintiff Margaret DeWeese-Boyd was a tenured associate professor of social work at Gordon College, a private nondenominational Christian liberal arts college located in Massachusetts.  Gordon’s faculty handbook noted that Gordon’s core curriculum “explores the liberal arts and sciences from a Christian perspective” and the President of Gordon testified that “[e]very subject matter that we pursue is informed by, shaped by, the Christian tradition.”  The handbook further provided that Gordon expected that faculty members “promote understanding of their disciplines from the perspectives of the Christian faith and to engage in scholarship, professional participation, and dissemination of research and creative work appropriate to their disciplines.” In 2016, Gordon added the term “minister” into the faculty handbook such that the description of a faculty member’s duty newly read as follows:  “In the Gordon College context, faculty members are both educators and ministers to our students.” 

Aside from referencing the faculty handbook, Plaintiff’s employment contract did not “explicitly provide for any spiritual responsibilities.”  The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (“SJC”) observed:

DeWeese-Boyd is not ordained by any church body or denomination, nor was she ever formally commissioned or ordained as a minister for Gordon. She was never required to complete education or professional development regarding ministerial responsibilities. She never viewed herself or held herself out as a minister for Gordon, nor did she understand her job to include responsibility for encouraging students to participate in religious life or leading them in spiritual exercises. She did not teach religion or biblical studies to students, take students to religious services at Gordon, lead or select content for chapel services at Gordon, conduct Bible studies at Gordon, or preach at Gordon. She attended Gordon chapel services approximately twice per year.

Plaintiff applied for a promotion to a full professor position in 2016, but the President and governing body declined to grant her the promotion for a variety of reasons, none of which referenced religious or ministerial matters or theological disagreement. 

After learning of her non-promotion, Plaintiff sued Gordon alleging that it failed to promote her to full professor status based on her religious beliefs regarding same-sex marriage, in violation of G. L. c. 151B, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion (among other protected categories), the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act, and her employment contract.

Supreme Judicial Court’s Opinion

The SJC first analyzed the “threshold question, which is whether Gordon is a religious institution.”  Although the U.S. Supreme Court has not yet analyzed the ministerial exception outside the context of an employer that is itself a traditional church or organized sect, the SJC noted that federal circuit courts have previously “concluded that to invoke the exception, an employer need not be a traditional religious organization, so long as its ‘mission is marked by clear or obvious religious characteristics.’”1  The SJC adopted this expansive test of a religious institution and found that Gordon satisfied this test because “Gordon has a clear commitment to Christian principles, as well as historical religious roots,” even if it is non-denominational. 

The SJC specifically rejected the notion that the institution’s primary purpose must be religious-based by concluding that there is “no primary purpose requirement.”  In support, the SJC noted: “All of Gordon’s governing documents reference religious purposes, and all members of the Gordon community, including its faculty, are expected to articulate and affirm their faith and abide by faith-based behavioral standards.”  As such, the SJC concluded that Gordon was a “religious institution” based on the “abundant record concerning Gordon's obvious religious character.”

The SJC then turned to the critical inquiry as to whether Plaintiff was in fact a minister.  The SJC took its cue from Our Lady of Guadalupe School and began with an analysis of what Plaintiff “did, and what she did not do.”  Plaintiff was a college professor of social work and, unlike the plaintiffs in Our Lady of Guadalupe School, she “was not required to, and did not, teach classes on religion, pray with her students, or attend chapel with her students,” and, unlike the plaintiff in Hosanna-Tabor, she did not “lead students in devotional exercises or lead chapel services.”  The SJC found this to be a “significant difference.” 

Although Plaintiff was required to “engage in teaching and scholarship from a Christian perspective and integrate her faith into her work,” the SJC found this insufficient to render her a minister.  The Court noted that, unlike the duties of the teachers in Our Lady of Guadalupe School and Hosanna-Tabor, the integrative function of Plaintiff’s job was “not tied to a sectarian curriculum: it does not involve teaching any prescribed religious doctrine, or leading students in prayer or religious ritual.”  The SJC found that Gordon’s insertion of the term “minister” into the faculty handbook following 18 years of Plaintiff’s employment was also not dispositive as to her ministerial status.

The Court recognized the potentially broad reading of Our Lady of Guadalupe School to include all employees of a religious institution as ministers, but rejected such an approach based on the Supreme Court’s own language.  Otherwise, the “breadth of this expansion of the ministerial exception and its eclipsing and elimination of civil law protection against discrimination would be enormous.”

Although the SJC recognized that a particular case “need not mirror” the facts from Our Lady of Guadalupe School and Hosanna-Tabor to satisfy the ministerial exception, the facts in DeWeese-Boyd were “materially different” and, accordingly, she fell outside the scope of the exception.2

Employer Takeaways

The SJC narrowed the scope of which employees are ministers under the ministerial exception, and found that an attempt to shoehorn every employee of a religious employer into the ministerial exception would not be permitted.  Nevertheless, the Court did underscore the following points of which religious employers both in and out of Massachusetts should take note:

• Lower Threshold for Religious Nature of Employer. An institution need not be a traditional religious organization to potentially qualify for the ministerial exception as long as its “mission is marked by clear or obvious religious characteristics.”  Therefore, institutions that are only affiliated with a particular religion may benefit from the ministerial exception analysis. 
• Highlight Religious Nature in Employment and Mission Documents. The Court thoroughly analyzed the factual record, particularly the school’s faculty handbook and mission statements, for indications as to the religiosity of the institution and the religious nature of the plaintiff’s job duties.  Employers should consider underscoring their religious foundations in such documents to strengthen potential arguments that it is sufficiently religious to be covered by the ministerial exception.
• Outer Limits of Scope of Minister. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has not yet drawn an outer limit of the term “minister” under the ministerial exception and, although its most recent case suggested an expansive scope, courts will apparently not shy away from finding that specific fact patterns fail to meet some still-undefined threshold for religious job duties for an employee to constitute a minister.  Until the U.S. Supreme Court weighs in on this issue, employers should expect to see courts in both the federal and state judiciaries to reach opposing conclusions on this fact-specific inquiry.3

While this case arose under Massachusetts’s discrimination laws, religious employers with operations even outside of Massachusetts should pay attention to the analysis and holdings of the SJC in DeWeese-Boyd as this decision provides a useful framework in analyzing the intersection between religious freedoms and civil rights protections.  Seyfarth lawyers are available to assist employers with properly analyzing whether the ministerial exception applies to them.

 

1 Citing, for example, Conlon v. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 777 F.3d 829, 831, 834 (6th Cir. 2015) (concluding that campus ministry whose purpose “is to establish and advance at colleges and universities witnessing communities of students and faculty who follow Jesus as Savior and Lord: growing in love for God, God’s Word, God’s people of every ethnicity and culture and God's purposes in the world” is religious institution).

2 The SJC noted that the fact that Plaintiff “was expected and required to be a Christian teacher and scholar, but not a minister,” was a sufficiently significant distinction to conclude she exceeded the bounds of a covered minister. 

3 See e.g., Woods v. Seattle's Union Gospel Mission, No. 96132-8, 2021 WL 821959 (Wash. Mar. 04, 2021) (analyzing the ministerial exception and its application to Washington’s anti-discrimination laws but remanding to the trial court the determination as to whether the plaintiff was a minister); Crisitello v. St. Theresa Sch., 465 N.J. Super. 223, 242 A.3d 292 (App. Div. 2020) (concluding that the plaintiff was not a minister similar to the plaintiffs in Our Lady of Guadalupe School and Hosanna-Tabor because “there was no evidence that she performed any religious duties” in her “core duties as a lay teacher's aide for toddlers or as an art teacher”); Menard v. Archdiocese of Bos., 98 Mass. App. Ct. 144, 152 N.E.3d 151 (2020) (holding that the employee’s job duties “place her squarely within the ministerial exception” since she “selected and played music at all parish events, taught and conducted multiple choirs, trained the church's cantors, and organized the cantors' schedule for Mass”).