Photo Credit: Robin Shea, Viewpoint: Vaccination Accommodation—Is that Religious Request Sincere?, SHRM, https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/benefits-compensation/viewpoint-vaccination-accommodation-is-religious-request-sincere (September 14, 2021).
Authored by: Elizabeth Gracie Smith
An employee’s request for religious accommodations is required to be rooted in a “bona fide religious belief,”[1] not simply an employee’s personal preference according to the Ninth Circuit in a 2025 case involving the COVID-19 vaccine.[2]
In that decision, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court’s dismissal for failure to state a claim of an employment discrimination action brought under Title VII and Oregon’s parallel state law.[3] The Court held that in 2021, an employee who worked at a hospital in Oregon, failed to plead a bona fide religious belief that conflicted with her employer’s policy.[4] This policy implemented the Oregon Health Authority’s administrative rule which required healthcare workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19, absent an approved exemption.[5]
The employer did approve the plaintiff’s initial request for a religious exemption from vaccination, and as part of this accommodation, the plaintiff was required to wear personal protective equipment while in the office and to test weekly for COVID-19 antigens.[6] The plaintiff then sought further accommodation to be exempted from the weekly antigen testing due to research she found that led her to believe the antigen testing contained carcinogenic materials which she claimed violated her religious beliefs.[7] The employer denied further accommodations to avoid this testing and later terminated her employment.[8]
The Ninth Circuit has held that, for a claim of religious discrimination, a plaintiff must begin by pleading “a prima facie case of failure to accommodate her religion.”[9] If the plaintiff meets this burden, then the employer must show the refusal to accommodate the religion was justified.[10] The plaintiff demonstrates a prima facie case of discrimination by showing she had a bona fide religious belief, the practice of this belief conflicted with one or more of her employment duties, she informed her employer of the belief and conflict, and the employer then threatened to or subjected her with discriminatory treatment because of the inability to fulfill the job requirements.[11] When an employee requests an accommodation, they are required to show sufficient facts that the accommodation request comes directly from a bona fide religious belief.[12]
The EEOC has refined Title VII and other caselaw to mean an employee’s request for an exemption from the COVID-19 vaccine can be denied if “the employee’s objection . . . is not religious in nature.”[13] Thus, a plaintiff does not state a prima facie case if the belief motivating the request for accommodation is not actually religious.[14] The Ninth Circuit has also not yet endorsed a test for determining whether a belief is religious or secular, instead often relying on the First Amendment doctrine for guidance on assessing a plaintiff’s religious assertions.[15]
Courts are not required to accept entirely conclusory assertions of a plaintiff’s religious beliefs.[16] It is often necessary to inquire into the religious or secular nature of a belief in order to prevent religious labels from becoming free to ignore any obligation imposed on them.[17] Still, courts have struggled to draw this line.[18] However, courts are not allowed to substitute their own judgment in place of the believers,[19] and they must also not judge the reasonableness under the disguise of the claim’s sufficiency.[20]
Overlap between religious and secular bases for a belief poses issues. In the constitutional context, and supported by the EEOC, a belief that is grounded in simultaneous religious and secular considerations is “presumably protected.”[21] Thus, a plaintiff, by asserting a general religious idea and simply connecting that principle with her personal medical judgment, does not state a claim for religious accommodation.
Here, the Court held that the district court does not need to examine the reasonableness or sincerity of a belief, but need only determine if a plaintiff has given enough facts to show that her belief is actually religious rather than purely secular.[22] Because of this, the Ninth Circuit held that the plaintiff’s complaint was not sufficient to show a bona fide religious belief that was in conflict with her former employer’s testing requirement.[23] The Court decided that her belief that the antigen testing swab was carcinogenic was personal and secular rather than actually religious.[24]
They also concluded that the plaintiff’s proposed standard would result in “unmanageable expansion” of Title VII protections.[25] If her assertions in this case were enough for a prima facie claim for a religious exemption, the bounds on typically secular preferences that an employee could define as religious and require an employer to accommodate would be greatly expanded.
This conclusion differed from the majority approach held by other circuits, including the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Circuits.[26] Joining the Third Circuit, this Court declined to adopt a more lenient approach which allows a complaint to survive with only conclusory statements about the religious nature of a particular belief.[27] They concluded the plaintiff did not state a claim for religious accommodation since she only asserted a general religious principle and linked it to her personal and medical judgment that she confirmed through personal prayer.[28]
In the dissent, Judge VanDyke wrote that the majority in this opinion adopted a flawed analysis that tries to distinguish a category of purely secular claims only incidentally linked to a general religious principle from a category of “truly religious” claims.[29] He wrote that he would have followed the majority of circuits and assumed as true the plaintiff’s allegation that she requested a religious accommodation from the COVID-19 testing requirement; after her employer denied that request, she was ultimately terminated for refusing to undergo testing.[30] He claims that as pled, her religious beliefs clearly constituted a fundamental element of her objection to antigen testing.[31]
This decision signals that, at least in the Ninth Circuit, employees seeking religious accommodations must plead more than a generalized religious principle coupled with personal or scientific objections. Plaintiffs will need to clearly show how a challenged workplace requirement directly conflicts with a bona fide religious belief, rather than a personal judgment informed by research, health concerns, or individual conscience. For employers, particularly in regulated industries such as healthcare, the ruling gives greater certainty at the pleading stage and may encourage dismissal of accommodation claims that do not clearly state a religious foundation. At the same time, the decision deepens an existing circuit split, increasing the likelihood of inconsistent outcomes for similarly situated employees depending on jurisdiction and raising the need for future Supreme Court review to clarify the pleading standard for Title VII religious accommodation claims.
[1] Heller v. EBB Auto Co., 8 F.3d 1433, 1438 (9th Cir. 1993).
[2] Detwiler v. Mid-Columbia Med. Ctr., 156 F.4th 886 (9th Cir. 2025).
[3] Id. at 900.
[4] Id.
[5] Id. at 890.
[6] Id. at 891.
[7] Id.
[8] Detweiler, 156 F.4th at 891-92.
[9] Bolden-Hardge v. Off. Of Cal. State Controller, 63 F.4th 1215, 1222 (9th Cir. 2023).
[10] Id.
[11] Heller, 8 F.3d at 1438.
[12] See Tiano v. Dillard Dep’t Stores, Inc., 139 F.3d 679, 682–83 (9th Cir. 1998) (holding that the timing of an employee’s religious pilgrimage was a matter of personal preference instead of a bona fide religious belief).
[13] What You Should Know About COVID-19 and the ADA, the Rehabilitation Act, and Other EEO Laws, U.S. Equal Emp. Opportunity Comm’n (Mar. 1, 2022), https://www.eeoc.gov/wysk/what-you-should-know-aboutcovid-19-and-ada-rehabilitation-act-and-other-eeo-laws.
[14] Heller, 8 F.3d at 1438.
[15] Keene v. City and Cnty. of San Francisco, No. 22-16567, 2023 WL 3451687, at *2 (9th Cir. May 15, 2023).
[16] Bolden-Hardge, 63 F.4th at 1223 (relying on Oklevueha Native Am. Church of Haw., Inc. v. Lynch, 828 F.3d 1012, 1016–17 (9th Cir. 2016)).
[17] See e.g., Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205, 215–16 (1972) (explaining that “purely secular considerations” will not merit constitutional religious protections).
[18] See Callahan v. Woods, 658 F.2d 679, 687 (9th Cir. 1981) (“A secular experience can stimulate a spiritual response; lives are not so compartmentalized that one can readily keep the two separate.”).
[19] See Heller, 8 F.3d at 1438 (“[I]t is no business of courts to say . . . what is a religious practice or activity.”).
[20] Id.; Thomas, 450 U.S. at 714 (discussing how the question of whether a belief is religious should not “turn upon a judicial perception of the particular belief or practice in question; religious beliefs need not be acceptable, logical, consistent, or comprehensible to others in order to merit First Amendment protection.”).
[21] Callahan, 658 F.2d at 684.
[22] Detwiler, 156 F.4th at 895.
[23] Id.
[24] Id. at 896.
[25] Id. at 900.
[26] See e.g., Lucky v. Landmark Med. Of Mich., 103 F.4th 1241, 1243 (6th Cir. 2024) (holding a plaintiff is not required to explain tenant of their religion prohibits vaccinations, and only requires facts “supporting an inference that her refusal to be vaccinated . . . was an ‘aspect’ of her ‘religious observance’ or ‘practice’ or ‘belief.’”); Passarella v. Aspirus, Inc., 108 F.4th 1005, 1007 (7th Cir. 2024) (“Courts should not undertake to dissect religious beliefs . . . because [they] are not articulated with the clarity and precision that a more sophisticated person might employ.”). Ringhofer v. Mayo Clinic, Ambulance, 102 F.4th 894, 902 (8th Cir. 2024) (concluding that by connecting an objection to “specific religious principles,” a plaintiff satisfies the burden at the pleading stage).
[27] See McDowell v. Bayhealth Med. Ctr., Inc., No. 24-1157, 2024 WL 4799870, at *3 (3d Cir. Nov. 15, 2024) (holding that a “general moral commandment” drawn from religion cannot change a medical objection into a religious objection).
[28] Detwiler, 156 F.4th at 900.
[29] Id. at 901.
[30] Id. at 907.
[31] Id.
American Journal of Trial Advocacy 