Published February 3, 2025
On February 3, 2025, EPPC fellow Eric Kniffin filed a Ninth Circuit amicus brief in Union Gospel Mission v. Ferguson to argue for a religious employer’s right to use faith-based criteria in its hiring decisions.
Union Gospel Mission is a Christian rescue ministry that has been serving the less fortunate of central Washington State for nearly a century. It filed this lawsuit to ask the court to declare that the Washington Attorney General’s Office could not punish the ministry for using faith-based criteria when choosing its employees.
This case comes in the wake of a 2021 decision from the Washington Supreme Court that narrowed the exemption for religious employers in the Washington Law Against Discrimination (WLAD). The WLAD generally prohibits Washington employers from discriminating on the basis of protected classes, including religion or creed. But the Washington State Legislature, like many other states, included in the statute an exemption for “any religious or sectarian organization not organized for private profit.”
The Washington Supreme Court, however, took it upon itself to rewrite this statute and create a far narrower religious exemption. As interpreted by the Washington Supreme Court, the WLAD treats a religious organization just like a secular employer except for when a religious organization is hiring its top leaders or those entrusted with teaching the faith.
EPPC’s brief explains that the Washington Supreme Court’s radical narrowing of the WLAD’s religious employer puts Washington State out of step with American history, other states’ laws, and even the First Amendment’s church autonomy doctrine.
The brief argues:
“[Union Gospel Mission], as a religious organization, has concluded that hiring coreligionists is essential to its religious mission. “If the Mission cannot foster an inward community of co-believers who share the same belief and seek to advance the same goals with the same spirit it cannot achieve its overarching purpose to spread the Gospel through its social welfare work.” Id. As the district court noted, if the Mission “is forced to hire those who do not [share its religious views], or those who do not adhere to those views, it may eventually be extinguished from public life.
According to the Mission and the district court, the freedom to determine which employees must affirm and follow its religious convictions is essential. It’s essential to the Mission’s ability to accomplish its God-given mission. It’s essential to the Mission’s identity, its self-understanding, and to its public witness. The mission, like many organizations, understands that personnel is policy. If it cannot live out this conviction, it cannot be itself[.]
Amicus urges the Court to affirm the district court on First Amendment grounds and thus ensure that the Mission and countless other Washington State religious organizations remain free to operate and carry out their religious missions.”
Eric Kniffin is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he works on a range of initiatives to protect and strengthen religious liberty as part of EPPC’s Administrative State Accountability Project.
