With a seismic ruling on January 6, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has redrawn the landscape for religious employers in nine western states, impacting organizations with a combined workforce of thousands. The decision, stemming from a lawsuit by the Union Gospel Mission of Yakima, allows these nonprofits to apply faith-based conduct standards to every employee, from clergy to cooks. To help us understand the immediate and long-term implications for human resources professionals, we’re joined by Ling-yi Tsai, our HRTech expert who brings decades of experience assisting organizations in navigating complex regulatory and cultural change. Our conversation will explore the practical steps HR leaders must now consider, the critical importance of documentation in defending hiring decisions, the nuanced legal lines drawn by the court, and the potential pitfalls of using faith as a pretext for other forms of discrimination.
The 9th Circuit recently allowed religious nonprofits to apply faith-based conduct standards to all staff, from cooks to IT technicians. For HR leaders in these nine states, what immediate, practical steps should they take to review and potentially update their employment policies and handbooks?
The first thing I’d recommend is a top-to-bottom audit of all employment-facing documents. This isn’t just about the employee handbook; it’s about job descriptions, application forms, and offer letters. The key is to ensure that any conduct requirement is explicitly and consistently tied back to the organization’s core religious mission. Look at the Union Gospel Mission’s approach—they are upfront with applicants from the very beginning and require a signed agreement to their statement of faith. Your policies must clearly state why these standards are in place—to create an internal faith community, to present a consistent message, and to ensure staff can model the organization’s beliefs for those they serve. It has to feel less like a set of corporate rules and more like an authentic extension of the ministry’s soul.
This ruling requires an employer to prove its hiring decisions are based on genuine religious beliefs. What specific documentation and internal processes would you recommend an organization like Union Gospel Mission implement to successfully defend a decision to not hire someone for a non-ministerial role?
Documentation is everything here; it’s the shield that proves a decision was based on conviction, not caprice. I would advise creating what I call a “mission integration framework” for every single role. For an IT technician, for example, the job description shouldn’t just list technical skills. It should also detail how that person contributes to the ministry, perhaps by ensuring the technological infrastructure that supports prayer hotlines or online devotionals is stable. Union Gospel’s belief that employees are its “hands, feet, and mouthpiece” must be documented in practice. This means keeping meticulous, contemporaneous notes during the hiring process that clearly show religious alignment was discussed and that an applicant’s stated inability to adhere to the faith statement was the specific, documented reason for not proceeding.
The court distinguished between religious ministries and other religiously-affiliated entities like for-profit businesses or hospitals. What are the key legal differences, and what challenges might a religiously-affiliated hospital face if it tried to apply similar organization-wide conduct rules to its nursing staff?
The court drew a very bright line, and it’s a critical one. The ruling was explicitly limited to “religious ministries” like Union Gospel, where faith is pervasive—they have daily prayers and weekly chapel services as part of the work environment. A religiously-affiliated hospital, by contrast, operates in a much more public and secular sphere. Its primary mission is patient care, not evangelism. A hospital would face an enormous challenge trying to argue that a nurse’s personal life, outside the hospital walls, is essential to the organization’s central religious mission of providing healthcare. They would have to demonstrate that the hospital is not just founded on religious principles, but that it operates as a ministry in its day-to-day functions, which is a fundamentally different and much higher legal bar to clear.
This protection allows religious employers to enforce conduct rules but not to discriminate on other grounds or use faith as a pretext. Could you provide a concrete example of a hiring scenario that would likely be protected and one that would likely be considered unlawful pretext?
Certainly. A protected scenario would closely mirror the Union Gospel case. Imagine a candidate applies for a kitchen worker position at a shelter. They have excellent culinary skills, but when presented with the organization’s conduct rules requiring adherence to its beliefs on marriage, the candidate honestly states they cannot sign it. The organization documents this specific point of disagreement and declines to hire them. That decision is directly and demonstrably based on religious belief.
Now, for an unlawful pretext: Suppose that same shelter has an opening for an operations assistant. Two candidates are finalists, both of whom sign the statement of faith without issue. One candidate is 30, and the other is 60. The hiring manager chooses the younger candidate, and the older one files an age discrimination claim. If the organization then tried to argue that the younger candidate had a more “vibrant” or “energetic” expression of faith that better suited the role, that would almost certainly be seen as a pretext. They are using vague religious language to mask a clear case of potential age discrimination. The protection is for the belief itself, not for personal preferences dressed up in religious clothing.
What is your forecast for religious hiring protections?
I believe we are at the beginning of a new chapter of litigation, not the end. This 9th Circuit decision, while a major victory for religious ministries, has opened a Pandora’s box of questions. The immediate future will be defined by legal challenges testing the boundaries of what constitutes a “religious ministry” versus a merely “religiously-affiliated” organization like a university or hospital. We’re going to see a wave of cases that force courts to dig into the day-to-day operations of these employers to determine just how central their religious mission is. This will create a period of uncertainty, pushing HR departments in these organizations to become more rigorous and explicit than ever in defining and documenting their religious identity and its connection to every single role.