Opinion ID: 1641487
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: establishment clause considerations

Text: Appellee GM contends that a construction of the FEPA that finds an affirmative duty on the part of the employer to reasonably accommodate an employee's religious needs unless undue hardship can be shown would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution [11] and art 1, § 4 of the Michigan Constitution by obliging it to treat its employees disparately based solely on religious considerations. This constitutional issue is both complex and difficult, and like the previous issue, has caused the courts of both the state and federal forums which have considered it no small amount of difficulty, attested to, in part, by the differing results reached by those courts. Indeed, appellate courts have not been loath to avoid reaching the issue whenever possible. [12] Despite the difficulty of the issue, however, we feel we cannot properly avoid it. In its answer to the MCRC's charge, GM asserted as its fourth affirmative defense the unconstitutionality of any reasonable accommodation requirement. The opinion of the MCRC held such an assertion to be without merit; the trial court, on the other hand, found the MCRC's reasonable accommodation guideline to contain substantial constitutional implications. Further, the factual posture of the case makes the issue unavoidable. For GM this is admittedly a test case. It has not attempted in any way whatsoever to accommodate Ms. Parks' religious needs, nor has it attempted to prove with record support that it can do nothing to help claimant because of a resulting undue hardship to its business. Thus these alternate, factual avenues of resolution are at this point foreclosed to us. Finally, and most importantly, the parties have had a chance to fully express their viewpoints on this issue  GM in its brief to this Court and the MCRC in its oral argument before us. Thus, although the Court of Appeals did not need to reach the constitutional issue due to its interpretation of the FEPA, we feel that issue is properly before us. A look at the results of the other courts which have preceded us in deciding this difficult and sensitive issue serves to perplex as much as to inform. Each court to consider the issue has approached it more or less through the now well-known three-part test that the United States Supreme Court has established over the years in dealing with Establishment Clause issues. See Committee for Public Education & Religious Liberty v Nyquist, 413 US 756, 772; 93 S Ct 2955; 37 L Ed 2d 948 (1973). To pass constitutional muster under the Establishment Clause the law in question first, must reflect a clearly secular legislative purpose, second, must have a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion, and third, must avoid excessive government entanglement with religion. Id., 773. In a word, neutrality is what is required of the state. Roemer v Board of Public Works of Maryland, 426 US 736, 747; 96 S Ct 2337; 49 L Ed 2d 179 (1976). Yet despite the same approach to the issue, the results of the courts have been anything but uniform. In the federal forum where the discussion centers on the constitutionality of the 1972 amendment to Title VII, the district courts have split on the issue, [13] while all three federal courts of appeals to confront it on the merits have come out in favor of its constitutionality, although accompanied by dissents. [14] Of the state courts mentioned as requiring reasonable accommodation, only the California Supreme Court in Rankins, supra, has passed on the issue, finding the requirement not violative of the Establishment Clause. The United States Supreme Court, as will be discussed infra, has yet to make an explicit pronouncement on the matter. Although we do not have the comfort of a clear and convincing majority rule on this issue which by its persuasiveness as well as its force of numbers would ease the decisional process, we are confident, after considerable research and contemplation, that a reading of the FEPA's general prohibition of religious discrimination to require reasonable accommodation by the employer to the employee's religious needs does not violate either the federal or this state's constitution. In reaching this decision we have looked for guidance, like the courts which have preceded us in similar cases, to the substantial body of United States Supreme Court case law on the Establishment Clause. We think such a course appropriate since this Court has previously acknowledged the similarities between the federal constitution's Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses and art 1, § 4 of this state's constitution, with the consequence that they are subject to similar interpretation. Taken together, these sentences [art 1, § 4] are an expanded and more explicit statement of the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, the first and fourth sentences constituting the free exercise clause, and the second and third sentences constituting the establishment clause. They are, accordingly, subject to similar interpretation. Advisory Opinion re Constitutionality of PA 1970, No 100, 384 Mich 82, 105; 180 NW2d 265 (1970). [15] We are also aware that the United States Supreme Court itself has noted that the tripartite test which it has developed for Establishment Clause issues is only intended to serve as a guideline with which to identify instances in which the objectives of the Establishment Clause have been impaired, and must not be viewed as setting the precise limits to the necessary constitutional inquiry. Meek v Pittenger, 421 US 349, 359; 95 S Ct 1753; 44 L Ed 2d 217 (1975). See also Tilton v Richardson, 403 US 672, 678; 91 S Ct 2091; 29 L Ed 2d 790 (1971). [16] In using this test then as our Baedeker to this area, we must not forget the general lay of the land in which we are traveling. As was noted in Walz v Tax Comm of New York City, 397 US 664, 668-669; 90 S Ct 1409; 25 L Ed 2d 697 (1970), The sweep of the absolute prohibitions in the Religion Clauses may have been calculated; but the purpose was to state an objective, not to write a statute.    The Court has struggled to find a neutral course between the two Religion Clauses, both of which are cast in absolute terms, and either of which, if expanded to a logical extreme, would tend to clash with the other.    The course of constitutional neutrality in this area cannot be an absolutely straight line. That this constitutionally required neutrality does not demand an unyielding and absolute rigidity, the slightest deviation from which is proscribed, was made clear in Walz, supra : The general principle deducible from the First Amendment and all that has been said by the Court is this: that we will not tolerate either governmentally established religion or governmental interference with religion. Short of those expressly proscribed governmental acts there is room for play in the joints productive of a benevolent neutrality which will permit religious exercise to exist without sponsorship and without interference. Id., 669 (emphasis supplied). See also Sherbert v Verner, 374 US 398, 415-416, 422-423; 83 S Ct 1790; 10 L Ed 2d 965 (1963) (Stewart, J., concurring in result, Harlan, J., dissenting) . In short, total separation between church and state is not called for, nor is it possible in an absolute sense; some relationship between government and religious organizations is inevitable. Lemon v Kurtzman, 403 US 602, 614; 91 S Ct 2105; 29 L Ed 2d 745 (1971). Incidental, indirect, or remote benefits to religion do not alone render a particular law constitutionally invalid. Nyquist, supra, 771. [T]he line between state neutrality to religion and state support of religion is not easy to locate. The constitutional standard is the separation of Church and State. The problem, like many problems in constitutional law, is one of degree.' Board of Education of Central School Dist No 1 v Allen, 392 US 236, 242; 88 S Ct 1923; 20 L Ed 2d 1060 (1968), quoting from Zorach v Clauson, 343 US 306, 314; 72 S Ct 679; 96 L Ed 954 (1952). With these thoughts in mind, we turn to a consideration of the Supreme Court's three-part test relating to the Establishment Clause. A. Secular Purpose The purpose of the FEPA's prohibition of religious discrimination and the reasonable accommodation requirement we have inferred in such a prohibition is to prevent discrimination in employment based on the legally irrelevant factor of religion. In other words, the purpose is to promote equal employment opportunities for members of all religious faiths, Rankins, supra, 178, and not to advance one religion over another or religion in general over non-religion. By requiring an employer to attempt reasonable accommodation of an employee's religious needs unless undue hardship would result to the employer's business, those who might have been unable to find or retain suitable employment due to an otherwise facially neutral work policy which conflicted with their religious tenets may now be able to join or stay in the work force without doing violence to their religious convictions. As the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit noted under the federal act, a secular purpose inheres in the law's intent to relieve individuals of the burden of choosing between their jobs and their religious convictions where such relief will not unduly burden others. Nottelson v Smith Steel Workers DALU 19806, 643 F2d 445, 454 (CA 7, 1981), cert den 454 US 1046 (1981). As we noted earlier, the reasonable accommodation requirement fosters the employment of all properly qualified persons. We conclude therefore that the purpose of such a requirement is truly a secular one. B. Primary Effect This prong of the three-part test requires us to determine whether in the present situation the primary effect of the reasonable accommodation requirement is to advance religion. This question is not easy to resolve since there is a good deal of logic to the position that since reasonable accommodation is based solely on religion, the requirement favors religion over non-religion, and favors some religions over others since only those religions which manifest their beliefs in acts requiring modification of an employer's work rules are benefited. See Cummins v Parker Seal Co, 516 F2d 544, 558 (CA 6, 1975) (Celebrezze, J., dissenting); Gavin v Peoples Natural Gas Co, 464 F Supp 622, 629 (WD Pa, 1979). Were we to interpret the requirement of reasonable accommodation as obliging the employer to treat employees unequally solely on the basis of their religions so as to require an employer to discriminate against some employees in order to accommodate or prefer the religious needs of others or to bear additional costs for an employee's religious needs when no such costs are incurred for other employees' religious needs, we might well run afoul of the Establishment Clause. However, we feel that Trans World Airlines, supra, obviates these anticipated problems. See Wheeler, Establishment Clause Neutrality and the Reasonable Accommodation Requirement, 4 Hastings Constitutional L Q 901, 903 (1977). We believe that an interpretation of the reasonable accommodation requirement that disallows treating employees unequally on the basis of religion can hardly be said to have the primary effect of advancing religion to any significant extent. The effect, rather, would be to restrain employers from enforcing uniform, facially neutral work rules that have a discriminatory effect on certain employees due to their religious beliefs and practices, thus guaranteeing job security except when accommodation of an employee's religious needs would impose an undue hardship (as that term has been interpreted in Trans World Airlines) upon the employer's business. It [the reasonable accommodation requirement of Title VII] does not confer a benefit on those accommodated, but rather relieves those individuals of a special burden that others do not suffer by permitting them to fulfill their societal obligations in a different manner   . Nottelson, supra, 454. While it may be argued that the reasonable accommodation requirement may benefit some religions as, for example, through a larger attendance at scheduled religious services which might otherwise be missed due to work schedules and therefore the receipt by those churches of a correspondingly fuller collection plate, Cummins, supra, 516 F2d 553, we believe such benefit to be incidental to the requirement's primary effect of preventing religious discrimination and guaranteeing equal employment opportunities to members of minority religions. C. Excessive Entanglement The third prong of the test requires the avoidance of excessive governmental entanglement with religion. The danger here is that an employee's expressed desire to have his or her employer accommodate his or her religious needs will eventually involve the government, via the MCRC and the courts, in determining the validity of the religious nature of the employee's claims, as well as the sincerity of the religious beliefs claimed to be held by the employee. It was just such a concern that formed the explicit basis for one federal district court's determination that § 701(j) of Title VII was unconstitutional. Gavin, supra, 464 F Supp 632. In that case there existed a controversy as to whether an employee could be required to raise and lower the American flag as part of his job. The employee, a Jehovah's Witness, claimed such a task was in violation of his religious belief against worshipping false idols. The trial court believed that a determination of whether the employee's belief could in fact be characterized as a religious one, and whether such a belief, which may be outside the standardized creed of his faith, was still protected under Title VII, would necessarily lead the court into an excessive entanglement with religion. Although this concern is certainly legitimate, to find the law unconstitutional on this basis would be imprudent. First of all, the religious validity of claimant's beliefs, as well as the sincerity in which they are held, are not questioned in this case. Secondly, a quick review of the decided case law relevant to this issue will disclose that the Gavin situation is quite unusual. Most of the cases involving a conflict between an employee's religious beliefs or practices and a work requirement usually concern the necessity to be absent from work in order to observe a Saturday Sabbath, a holy day, or to attend a compulsory religious meeting, or an inability to join a union or pay union dues pursuant to a union security clause. [17] See, e.g., Cummins (Saturday Sabbath); the Reid cases (Saturday Sabbath); Rankins (absences for holy days); the Yott cases (union security clause); the Anderson cases (union security clause); Local 1361 (union security clause); the Wondzell cases (union security clause). Most often in these types of cases, as in the present one, neither the sincerity of the employee's beliefs nor the religious validity of the belief or practice will be contested. We agree with the observation made in this regard in the context of Title VII in Cummins, supra, 516 F2d 554: Appellee suggests, however, that EEOC investigators will be forced to study and to evaluate the dogma of the many religious sects in order to ascertain whether employees' practices and observances are genuinely religious and therefore protected under Title VII. In most cases, this issue probably will not be disputed seriously. To the extent that the question does arise, however, we think that it will require no more government involvement in religion than the concededly nonexcessive entanglement that occurs when a state must determine whether a purported church qualifies for a property tax exemption. See Walz v Tax Comm, 397 US 664, 674-676   ; id., 698-699 (opinion of Harlan, J.). Cf. Nottelson, supra, 455 (conscientious objector exemption of selective service statutes involves a similar type of determination). Further, in cases such as Wisconsin v Yoder, 406 US 205, 216, 235; 92 S Ct 1526; 32 L Ed 2d 15 (1972), the Supreme Court has recognized the necessity of examining religious beliefs and the sincerity with which they are held in order to accord certain individuals free exercise rights over otherwise contrary state law. Without some recognition of the religious nature of the asserted conflict with public school education past the eighth grade in Yoder, the Supreme Court there could not have excused the Amish in that case from the state-imposed requirement of compulsory school attendance until the age of 16. See Note, Is Title VII's Reasonable Accommodations Requirement a Law Respecting an Establishment of Religion?, 51 Notre Dame Lawyer 481, 483-484 (1976). We therefore conclude that the reasonable accommodation requirement that we have read into the FEPA does not produce an excessive entanglement between government and religion. D. Overall Neutrality In sum, we think a reading of the FEPA's prohibition of religious discrimination that requires an employer to make reasonable accommodation to the religious needs of his employees unless undue hardship would result is entirely consistent with the necessity of government neutrality respecting matters of religion. Such a requirement is the type of play in the joints productive of a benevolent neutrality that the Supreme Court spoke of in Walz, supra, 669. As Justice Douglas wrote in Zorach v Clauson, 343 US 306, 313-314; 72 S Ct 679; 96 L Ed 954 (1952): We are a religious people   . We make room for as wide a variety of beliefs and creeds as the spiritual needs of man deem necessary. We sponsor an attitude on the part of government that shows no partiality to any one group and that lets each flourish according to the zeal of its adherents and the appeal of its dogma.    [A state acts properly when it] respects the religious nature of our people and accommodates the public service to their spiritual needs. The indirect benefit which certain religions may receive under our reading of the FEPA is qualitatively and quantitatively different from that most often found objectionable in Establishment Clause cases. First, we think it constitutionally significant that the reasonable accommodation requirement here at issue primarily benefits individuals, not institutions. See Nyquist, supra, 801 (Burger, C.J., concurring in part, dissenting in part). See also Jordan v North Carolina National Bank, 399 F Supp 172, 180 (WD NC, 1975), rev'd on other grounds 565 F2d 72 (CA 4, 1977). The minimal assistance given to individuals in securing or retaining employment, through the enhancement of their right of free exercise by the reasonable accommodation requirement, is far from the type of individual aid which the Supreme Court has proscribed as having the primary effect of advancing religion. We are not dealing with aid that in its effect is analogous to a state's attempt to directly alleviate a parent's burden in sending his or her child to parochial school through the use of tuition grants or tax benefits. In such a case the religious mission of the parochial school is so intertwined with the secular education it provides, that aid to the parent which better enables him or her to send the child there has the unmistakable effect of providing financial support to the sectarian institution which the child attends. Nyquist, supra, 783, 791. The primary and direct effect in this case, in contradistinction, is simply to provide individuals with a greater opportunity to secure or to remain employed in jobs where their religion is not a bona fide occupational qualification for the job, but rather presents a hindrance to the securing or maintaining of it because of a conflict between required practices of the religion and the neutral work schedule or policies of the employer. The thrust of the requirement is directed at the employment of individuals and not at the survival of institutions charged with a religious mission. Any aid filtering to a particular religion or to religion in general from the imposition of the reasonable accommodation requirement is too indirect and remote to be constitutionally significant. Second, the type of aid given to the employee is also significant. Here there is no direct financial support given to an individual on account of his religious beliefs or to a religious institution. Nothing as tangible as instructional materials and equipment, Meek, supra, 366, textbooks, Wolman v Walter, 433 US 229, 258-259; 97 S Ct 2593; 53 L Ed 2d 714 (1977) (Marshall, J., dissenting) , or standardized tests, Wolman, supra, 240-241 (plurality opinion) is provided. Rather the employer must merely seek to reasonably accommodate an employee's religious needs unless an undue hardship would be occasioned thereby on his business. Although this case does not present us with the issue of whether the Free Exercise Clause compels the reasonable accommodation requirement, we believe that the Establishment Clause certainly does not prohibit such a requirement. As the United States Supreme Court stated in the context of passing on the conscientious objector provision of the Military Selective Service Act of 1967: Quite apart from the question whether the Free Exercise Clause might require some sort of exemption, it is hardly impermissible for Congress to attempt to accommodate free exercise values, in line with `our happy tradition' of `avoiding unnecessary clashes with the dictates of conscience.' Gillette v United States, 401 US 437, 453; 91 S Ct 828; 28 L Ed 2d 168 (1971) (footnote omitted). See also Trans World Airlines, supra, 90-91 (Marshall, J., dissenting); Nottelson, supra, 454. This is consonant with the Supreme Court's earlier statement in Zorach, supra, 314, to the effect that we find no constitutional requirement which makes it necessary for government to be hostile to religion and to throw its weight against efforts to widen the effective scope of religious influence. Indeed, we feel this case somewhat analogous to that of Zorach, supra . In Zorach the United States Supreme Court upheld the released time program of New York City as a constitutional effort of the public schools to accommodate their schedules to a program of outside religious instruction, Zorach, supra, 315. Under this program a publicschool student, on written request of his or her parents, could be released from school for one hour a week to attend religious instruction or devotional exercises off the school grounds. We feel, similarly, that requiring employers to attempt a reasonable accommodation of their business to the religious needs of their employees does not breach the required wall of separation between church and state. To hold such a required attempt to accommodation unconstitutional would be to find in the Constitution a requirement that the government show a callous indifference to religious groups. That would be preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe. Zorach, supra, 314. In short, we do not find the reasonable accommodation requirement impermissibly tainted by the evils of `sponsorship, financial support, and active involvement of the sovereign in religious activity' against which the Establishment Clause was intended to afford protection. Lemon, supra, 612. We close by making clear that this Court does not intend to impart any definitive opinion on the degree of accommodation that may be required of an employer in a particular case. As one federal court of appeals has noted: The term `reasonable accommodation' is a relative term and cannot be given a hard and fast meaning. Each case involving such a determination necessarily depends upon its own facts and circumstances, and comes down to a determination of `reasonableness' under the unique circumstances of the individual employer-employee relationship. The trier of fact is in the best position to weigh these considerations. Redmond v GAF Corp, 574 F2d 897, 902-903 (CA 7, 1978). For our present purposes, however, it seems clear that an employer, in response to the communicated religious needs of its employee, must at least make some good-faith effort at accommodation and, if those efforts are unsuccessful, demonstrate that it was unable reasonably to accommodate the employee's religious needs without undue hardship, or, failing the employer's taking of active steps toward accommodation, the employer must prove that any proposed or possible accommodation would have created an undue hardship on its business. See Edwards v School Board of the City of Norton, 483 F Supp 620, 625 (WD Va, 1980). In this case claimant has made a prima facie showing of religious discrimination by her employer against her religious needs and the need for accommodation. See Brown v General Motors Corp, 601 F2d 956, 959 (CA 8, 1979). In response, however, GM has stipulated to its failure to consider any alternative to Ms. Parks' religious needs other than dismissal, thus taking a position from the beginning that it had no duty to reasonably accommodate. GM has therefore clearly failed to prove that it has made good-faith efforts to accommodate claimant's religious beliefs. Likewise, GM has also failed to press on this Court any claim that it would have suffered an undue hardship on the conduct of its business were it to accommodate claimant's religious needs. See Mitcham v Detroit, 355 Mich 182, 203; 94 NW2d 388 (1959). Accordingly, we would reverse the judgments of both the circuit court and the Court of Appeals.