(RNS) — A federal appellate court ruled in favor of World Vision, a global Christian relief and development organization, last week, saying it was justified in revoking employment of a customer service representative after it learned the candidate was in a same-sex marriage.
The ruling, filed Tuesday (Aug. 5) in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, overturned an earlier decision by a lower court where Aubry McMahon filed a lawsuit arguing World Vision had discriminated against her marital status, sex and sexual orientation.
Initially, the district court ruled in World Vision’s favor, finding that the doctrine of church autonomy “foreclose(d) judicial inquiry into World Vision’s religiously motivated personnel decision.” But the lower court reversed its ruling after McMahon sought reconsideration and determined it could use “neutral principles of law” to conclude the case and not entangle itself in religion. That court also rejected World Vision’s other defenses, including ministerial exception.
But World Vision, which is known for connecting sponsors with children in need around the world, argued to the 9th Circuit that customer service representatives play a significant role in the ministry’s voice, and the higher court reversed the lower court’s decision.
Writing for a three-judge panel, Judge Richard C. Tallman said, “the district court erred by viewing the CSR’s responsibilities in the abstract, isolated from World Vision’s central mission.”
He added, “We now hold that the ministerial exception bars McMahon’s employment discrimination claims because the record shows that CSRs perform key religious functions central to World Vision’s mission.”
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World Vision logo. (Courtesy image)
Customer service representatives pray with supporters and donors over the phone and are “responsible for teaching curious donors about World Vision’s Christian faith and mission,” Tallman wrote.
McMahon, an openly gay Christian in a same-sex marriage, became pregnant in mid-June 2020, via a sperm donor, and gave birth in March 2021, the court said. While pregnant, McMahon saw a listing for a remote CSR position on a jobs website. In an interview after applying, according to court records, she was asked if she would follow the organization’s conduct standards and replied, “I’m aligned, yes!”
After being offered the job in early January 2021, McMahon followed up with a request for time off around the arrival of the baby she and her wife were expecting. World Vision then rescinded the job offer days later due to McMahon’s “inability” to follow its standards concerning marriage.
The head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the appeals court, welcomed the decision.
“Religious organizations must be able to hire employees who share their doctrinal commitments, including how their faith is practiced,” Miles Mullin, the ERLC’s acting president, told Baptist Press. “Otherwise, those commitments mean nothing, and the very nature of the organization is undermined.”
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which also filed an amicus brief in the case, said the decision could be detrimental for church-state separation.
“This case is part of a dangerous trend,” Rachel Laser, Americans United for Separation of Church and State president and CEO, told Religion News Service in a statement. “A network of conservative legal activists and religious organizations is urging courts to expand a narrow, commonsense rule — meant to allow houses of worship to select clergy according to their faith traditions — into a broad license to discriminate and circumvent civil rights laws. If we want to protect workers from discrimination, we need a national recommitment to the separation of church and state.”
The appeals court said customer service representatives at World Vision have “vital religious duties,” citing a 2020 Supreme Court ruling in Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, in which the high court carved out a broad ministerial exception to workplace discrimination rules that allows religious schools to include lay teachers as among those subject to exemption from civil rights laws.
The appellate court noted that neither party in the World Vision case disputed the religious nature of the charity. Tallman wrote the organization has an employee guidebook called the “Orange Book: Living Out Our Values” that discusses the ministry’s focus on prayer as well as “Standards of Conduct” that prohibit, among other things, “sexual conduct outside the Biblical covenant of marriage between a man and a woman.” Employment eligibility includes adhering to those standards.
The court rejected McMahon’s arguments that religious elements of the role were optional or equally applied to all World Vision staffers. Its ruling cited testimony and recordings of customer service calls that demonstrated the religious nature of the CSR job.
“In one call, a CSR and a current donor discuss how COVID-19 has impacted a 15-year-old in Zimbabwe that the donor has sponsored for the past nine years before praying together for the donor’s family during the pandemic,” Tallman wrote.
In another instance, after a discussion about clean water and sponsored children, a donor asked “the CSR to pray for his brother, who is ‘close to meeting God,’ and the donor puts the call on speakerphone so his wife can pray with the donor and the representative.”
Tallman noted that a ministerial exception may not apply to all World Vision employees.
“Secretaries, accountants and custodians at World Vision, despite having the same religious obligations to attend chapel and bear witness to Jesus Christ, would not qualify for the ministerial exception because, unlike CSRs, they are not charged with conveying the organization’s message to its donors — a role ‘vital’ to World Vision’s central mission,” he wrote.
In 2014, World Vision announced a short-lived policy that permitted employees to be in a same-sex marriage. Within 48 hours, after supporters threatened to pull donations, it reversed that policy.
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