Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/19pdf/19-267_1an2.pdf
Page Number: 39

Cite as:  591 U. S. ____ (2020) 

3 

SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting 

hiring or firing—for religious reasons.

The “ministerial exception,” by contrast, is a judge-made
doctrine.  This Court first recognized it eight years ago in 
Hosanna-Tabor, concluding that the First Amendment cat-
egorically bars certain antidiscrimination suits by religious
leaders  against  their  religious  employers.    565  U. S.,  at 
188–190.  When it applies, the exception is extraordinarily 
potent:  It  gives  an  employer  free  rein  to  discriminate  be-
cause of race, sex, pregnancy, age, disability, or other traits
protected by law when selecting or firing their “ministers,”
even when the discrimination is wholly unrelated to the em-
ployer’s religious beliefs or practices.  Id., at 194–195.  That 
is, an employer need not cite or possess a religious reason
at all; the ministerial exception even condones animus.

When this Court adopted the ministerial exception, it af-
firmed  the  holdings  of  virtually  every  federal  appellate
court that had embraced the doctrine.  Id., at 188, and n. 2. 
Those courts had long understood that the exception’s stark 
departure from antidiscrimination law is narrow.  Wary of
the exception’s “potential for abuse,” federal courts treaded
“case-by-case” in determining which employees are minis-
ters exposed to discrimination without recourse.  Scharon 
v.  St.  Luke’s  Episcopal  Presbyterian  Hospitals,  929  F. 2d 
360,  363,  n. 3  (CA8  1991).  Thus,  their  analysis  typically 
trained on whether the putative minister was a “spiritual 
leade[r]” within a congregation such that “he or she should
be  considered  clergy.”  Rayburn  v.  General  Conference  of 
Seventh-day  Adventists,  772  F. 2d  1164,  1168–1169  (CA4
1985) (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Hankins 
v. Lyght, 441 F. 3d 96, 117–118, and n. 13 (CA2 2006) (So-
tomayor,  J.,  dissenting)  (cataloging  Circuit  consensus).
That approach recognized that a religious entity’s ability to
choose its faith leaders—rabbis, priests, nuns, imams, min-
isters, to name a few—should be free from government in-
terference, but that generally applicable laws still protected 
most employees.