In religious accommodation case, Supreme Court mails it in
The Court's decision in Groff v. Dejoy, while better than nothing, is silent on the most important question
In the second-to-last day of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 term, the justices released their opinion in Groff v. DeJoy. The case involved a mail carrier, Gerald Groff, who sued the United States Postal Service for refusing to provide a religious accommodation when scheduling him for work on Sundays. In a unanimous, 9-0 decision, the Court ruled for Groff.
An evangelical Christian, Groff had worked for USPS since 2012, and for several years had received accommodations for his religious convictions about not working Sundays. However, as the volume for Amazon package deliveries increased, these accommodations became too much for USPS. It began to schedule Groff for Sunday shifts, and when he refused to take them, he was disciplined until he eventually resigned.
In today’s opinion, Justice Samuel Alito effectively sent this conflict back to the lower courts for reconsideration. Specifically, Alito’s opinion aimed to clarify the standard for determining whether a business or state entity would suffer an “undue hardship” as a result of making religious accommodations, as required by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Alito wrote that the lower courts were misinterpreting a 1977 case in evaluating the current conflict, erroneously leading them to rule for USPS. He concludes his opinion with the following:
Without foreclosing the possibility that USPS will prevail, we think it appropriate to leave it to the lower courts to apply our clarified context-specific standard, and to decide whether any further factual development is needed.
Advocates for religious liberty rightly praised the decision. Southern Seminary’s Andrew Walker hailed the decision as “very significant” and said it would go a long way toward correcting “horrible church-state jurisprudence.” And the New York Times’ David French said the decision was further evidence that “religious liberty has never been more protected” in the United States than at this moment.
To be sure, this decision is good for religious liberty. A ruling for USPS would have been a blow to religious accommodations moving forward, and a signal that the Court was rejecting a robust conception of religious freedom under the First Amendment and federal law. Given the Court’s strong conservative majority, that would have been very surprising.
However, today’s decision is not the slam dunk for religious liberty it may at first glance appear. Why not? Because the Court’s unanimous opinion goes out of its way to not answer the case’s most important question — whether Groff is assured a religious accommodation under Title VII and the First Amendment.
This is certainly not the first time the Court has refused to make a decision on the merits of an important case involving religious freedom. Just five years ago, in the Court’s decision for baker Jack Phillips in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Justice Anthony Kennedy said that the state’s hostile treatment of Phillips’ religious convictions during administrative hearings violated his constitutional rights.
But the Court’s opinion did not settle the question of whether business owners had complete freedom to turn away business from customers with whom they disagreed — particularly, those seeking services for same-sex weddings. Consider this passage at the end of Kennedy’s opinion:
The outcome of cases like this in other circumstances must await further elaboration in the courts, all in the context of recognizing that these disputes must be resolved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs, and without subjecting gay persons to indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market.
Essentially, in ruling for Jack Phillips the Court said that the state had not neutrally considered Phillips’ religious beliefs. If these kinds of conflicts emerge in the future—and they surely will—and the state approaches these conflicts in fairer ways, it remains to be seen whether people like Phillips will be protected after all.1
Which brings us back to Groff. Yes, the Court’s decision is good for religious freedom inasmuch as it overturns—and unanimously at that—a decision against an employee seeking a religious accommodation in the workplace. But the decision is limited in its scope and breadth, effectively ignoring the merits of Groff’s rights claims for now while instructing lower courts to hear his claims in more a favorable tone in the future.
David French is correct to note that religious liberty has never been more protected than at this moment, with a solid majority of the Supreme Court poised to continue to render favorable judgments. But today’s decision is not the end of the story for Gerald Groff. Should this case come back to the Supreme Court in the future, I’d expect a ruling on his behalf (though, as Alito notes, the Postal Service could prevail after all).
Until then, we’re left to wait and wonder.
The Court has an opportunity to provide some clarity in these questions in a case that should be announced tomorrow, Creative 303 LLC v. Ennis.