Court Opinion

ID: 9497735
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:58:44.308761+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:23.128456
License: Public Domain

KLEINFELD, Circuit Judge,
with whom, O’SCANNLAIN, CALLAHAN, and BEA, Circuit Judges, join,
dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc:
For the one of every five Americans who live in our circuit’s jurisdiction, the “wall of separation” between church and state now has a gate. The gate is one-way. The government may pass through to regulate the internal affairs of a church, but the church must remain on its own side. If King Henry II had lived in the Ninth Circuit, he would have won his struggle with Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, without having to insinuate “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”1 to incite his knights to murder. Though King Henry’s goals in the struggle were, among other things, to gain secular jurisdiction of disputes over ecclesiastical patronage and to require archbishops and bishops to get permission from him before leaving the country, he stopped short of asserting control of selection and expulsion of priests.2 Since selection and expulsion of ministers are the only protected reli*799gious spheres in this court’s shriveled version of the First Amendment, we would have granted him what he wished.
Elvig, a Presbyterian minister, brought Title VII sexual harassment and retaliation claims, claiming that a pastor at the church where she was an associate pastor created a hostile environment. The district court dismissed on the pleadings under the “ministerial exception” to Title VII, and we reversed.3 The majority held that a minister cannot sue her church under Title VII for firing her, but can nevertheless sue it for sexual harassment and retaliation for complaining about sexual harassment. The majority left the church an affirmative defense, though, if doctrinal reasons justified the conduct of the minister’s supervisors or fellow ministers. The majority applied and extended our previous decision allowing a Catholic novitiate’s sexual harassment suit to proceed in Bollard v. California Province of the Society of Jesus.4
The Elvig majority purports to preserve the ministerial exception by saying that churches’ hiring and firing decisions regarding ministers are not subject to Title VII, and that only churches’ supervisory decisions that may subject their ministers
to a hostile work environment are subject to Title VII. This is a false distinction. Churches’ supervision of ministers is as important to church autonomy as churches’ hiring and firing. In any case, to prevent lawsuits alleging sexual harassment, churches will fire ministers who they think expose them to the risk of damage awards and hire those who they think will not. So the Elvig majority’s opinion does indeed impinge on churches’ hiring and firing decisions.
Our crabbed application of the “ministerial exception” furthers an aggressively secularizing trend of the law in the Ninth Circuit5 and sets us apart from all of our sister circuits that have ruled on the application of Title VII to ministers.6 Although the Supreme Court has not spoken directly to the issue of the “ministerial exception,” our decision puts us in tension with what the Court has said regarding judicial interference with churches.
Perhaps our egregious misinterpretation of the law stems in part from the poorly chosen name, the “ministerial exception.” The real exception in Title VII is statutory.7 The statutory exception allows churches to discriminate on the basis of *800religion when they hire employees. So, for example, a Presbyterian cannot sue under Title VII because the Catholic Church would not employ him as a priest. This statutory exception protects churches in their hiring and firing, which may explain why our circuit has concluded that the “ministerial exception” protects churches only in hiring and firing. However, what the cases call the “ministerial exception” in Title VII cases is not really an “exception” at all; rather, it is a limitation on Title VII imposed by the Constitution. The First Amendment entitles the people to be free of any law “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”8 Where Title VII would operate as such a law — as all our sister circuits have held that it would if Title VII were applied to ministers of churches — it can have no force. Such an application violates two constitutional limitations on Congress, the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause.
I
In the bitter division of the Presbyterian Church during and after the Civil War, the Supreme Court held in Watson v. Jones9 that the courts were bound by the decisions of the highest Presbyterian church authority, because “[a]ll who unite themselves to such a body do so with an implied consent to this government,” and because it “would lead to the total subversion of such religious bodies, if any one aggrieved by one of their decisions could appeal to the secular courts and have them reversed.”10 The Court repudiated the English rule, which required inquiry into whether the church had a justification in its own doctrine for what it did (a rule similar to the majority’s religious justification defense adopted in Elvig), because the inquiry into religious principles would contradict the constitutional proposition that “[t]he law knows no heresy, and is committed to the support of no dogma, the establishment of no sect.”11
In Watson, the Court was so wary of intruding into religious matters that it held the case under advisement for a year in the hope that the parties would settle it.12 This wariness has continued uninterrupted to our time. In Serbian Eastern Orthodox Diocese v. Milivojevich,13 the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment prohibited courts from inquiring into whether a church’s governing body had power under religious law to decide a dispute as it did.14 The Court concluded:
In short, the First and Fourteenth Amendments permit hierarchical religious organizations to establish then-own rules and regulations for internal discipline and government, and to create tribunals for adjudicating disputes over these matters. When this choice is exercised and ecclesiastical tribunals are created to decide disputes over the government and direction of subordinate bodies, the Constitution requires that civil courts accept their decisions as binding upon them.15
Milivojevich made it clear that there was no arbitrariness exception to the First *801Amendment, and held that there was nothing that the courts could do about the church’s decision to remove a bishop.
Elvig had vowed “to be governed by ... Church[ ] polity, and to abide by its discipline.” 16 Yet after she litigated her sexual harassment case through the Presbyterian church hierarchy and lost, she chose not to abide by the church polity’s discipline. Instead, she subjected her church to the secular polity by bringing this lawsuit. Milivojevich holds that “the Constitution requires that civil courts accept ... as binding upon them” the decisions of tribunals who adjudicate disputes over internal discipline within hierarchical religious organizations. Yet we as a court have now violated the holding of Milivojevich by refusing to accept the decision of the Permanent Judicial Commission of the Presbytery “as binding.”
Pursuant to the Presbyterian Church’s Book of Order and-.Rules of Discipline, the Permanent Judicial Commission of the Presbytery rejected Elvig’s claims. The Rules of Discipline, which Elvig in this civil litigation accuses the church of violating, explain that “Church discipline is the church’s exercise of authority given by Christ ... the purpose of discipline is to honor God by making clear the significance of membership in the body of Christ.”17 The authority of the United States Courts is not “given by Christ” and the purposes we are authorized to advance do not include honoring “God by making clear the significance of membership in the body of Christ.” We have no business in this dispute.
II
No other circuit has purported to revive the English rule requiring the church to show doctrinal justification for its conduct, no doubt because that rule was expressly rejected by the Supreme Court in Watson.18 Yet the majority does just that by making it an affirmative defense that the church’s conduct was a matter of religious doctrine.19 Forcing churches to satisfy courts that their religious doctrines justify their conduct is just the sort of “excessive entanglement” that the First Amendment prohibits.20 Because Elvig holds that the church cannot obtain dismissal on the pleadings, either the judge on summary judgment or the jury will have to examine Presbyterian theology and Presbyterian hierarchical doctrine to decide whether the church’s supervision is doctrinally based. The incongruity of a secular court inquiring into whether a church’s decisions are doctrinal, required by .the majority opinion in Elvig, revives the English rule that the Supreme Court in Watson prohibited us from applying.
Our sister circuits that have spoken on the issue have thought it was quite plain before Employment Division v. Smith21 that the Free Exercise Clause prohibited courts from adjudicating Title VII cases between churches and their ministers.22 And after careful examination, they have *802concluded that Smith made no difference.23 In Combs v. Central Texas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, the Fifth Circuit held that a minister could not sue her Methodist church under Title VII for sex and pregnancy discrimination, even though no matters of religious dogma or ecclesiastical law were directly involved.24 The Free Exercise Clause requires the ministerial exception, which is “designed to protect the freedom of the church to select those who will carry out its religious mission.”25 And because “in investigating employment discrimination claims by ministers against their church, secular authorities would necessarily intrude into church governance in a manner that would be inherently coercive, ... we cannot conceive how the federal judiciary could determine whether an employment decision concerning a minister was based on legitimate or illegitimate grounds without inserting ourselves into a realm where the constitution forbids us to tread, the internal management of a church.”26 Likewise, the Seventh Circuit, in Young v. Northern Illinois Conference of United Methodist Church, rejected on Free Exercise grounds the Title VII claim of a Methodist probationary minister who was denied promotion and fired.27
The Eleventh Circuit rejected a Title VII retaliation claim by a minister in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, based on the Establishment Clause as applied under the Lemon v. Kurtzman28 test, because “[ijnvestigation by a government entity into a church’s employment of its clergy would almost always entail excessive government entanglement into the internal management of the church.”29 The Fourth Circuit, in Rayburn v. General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists, expressly rejected the notion, adopted by the Elvig majority, that such Title VII cases may go forward subject to a religious justification defense. The Fourth Circuit held that “we may not then inquire whether the reason for Rayburn’s rejection had some explicit grounding in theological belief’30 under the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause. The entanglement concern is especially strong in Title VII cases, the Fourth Circuit pointed out, because “questions of compliance may result in continued court surveillance” and “[tjhere is the danger that churches, wary of EEOC or judicial review of their decisions, might make them with an eye to avoiding litigation or bureaucratic entanglement rather than upon the basis of their own personal and doctrinal assessments of who would best serve the pastoral needs of their members.” 31 The Seventh Circuit in Alicear-Hemandez v. Catholic Bishop of Chicago likewise rejected the notion of a religious justification defense, because it would be inconsistent with the separation of church and state.32
The District of Columbia Circuit in EEOC v. Catholic University of America likewise held that a nun could not sue her *803Catholic institution under Title VII for denial of academic tenure, because even the government investigation that is a precursor to a Title VII claim may cause “excessive entanglement,” in violation of the Establishment Clause.33 The church would likely slant its own decisions away from religious doctrine to whatever was necessary to avoid the burden of litigation:
[W]e think it is fair to say that the prospect of future investigations and litigation would inevitably affect to some degree the criteria by which future vacancies in the ecclesiastical faculties would be filled. Having once been deposed, interrogated, and haled into court, members of the Department of Canon Law and of faculty review committees who are responsible for recommending candidates for tenure would do so “with an eye to avoiding litigation or bureaucratic entanglement rather than upon the basis of their own personal and doctrinal assessments of who would best serve ... the needs” of the Department.34
Laws that regulate relationships among ministers curtail a church’s autonomy in the establishment and propagation of its religious doctrines. Sexual harassment claims under Title VII are directed towards conduct, mostly verbal, among employees and between employees and employers. In this case, Elvig claimed in her complaint that a pastor had winked at her, made unwelcome remarks, and “undressed her with his eyes,”35 complaints sufficiently vague and difficult to verify that they necessarily invite the most searching government examination of the details of what the pastors said to each other and in what manner. Since the water cooler talk among ministers is probably about prayer and religious doctrine, just as among lawyers it is about law and among doctors it is medicine, ministers’ intra-office remarks cannot avoid entanglement with whatever may be Presbyterian theology. Where the Title VII violation is among ministers of a church, the government cannot regulate it without regulating religion itself. For this reason, Title VII regulation of the ministerial relationship interferes with a church’s constitutionally protected autonomy in a way that state law tort protection of parishioners does not. Further, while no church will knowingly hire a minister who molests boys, it might well hire a minister who condemns some sex roles or sexual relationships as sinful. Defining and condemning sin pursuant to a religious doctrine is a substantial part of what ministers are trained to do. Yet this core religious conduct would expose the church to Title VII liability from another minister whose conduct was condemned as sinful.36 Most insidiously, the effects of the Elvig regime will be, for the most part, invisible to the courts, because churches will have to change their own conduct, rules, and theological doctrine to avoid coming into contact with the apparatus of the state.
Ill
The First Amendment bestows on churches the right to select, manage, and discipline their clergy free from government control and scrutiny. Our decisions in Bollard and Elvig gravely infringe on that right. Instead of first asking “how *804will this employment decision further our religious objective?,” churches will be forced to ask “will this employment decision expose us to liability?” A church whose practices or informal doctrine clash with prevailing notions of sexual equality and expression could well find itself, like so many schools districts and prisons, under the supervision of a district court standing master. If a minister harps too much on the parts of the Bible that are currently not “politically correct,” his church will likely feel compelled as a matter of prudence to shut him up or get rid of him to avoid Title VII suits from colleagues offended by his preaching.37
Judge W. Fletcher’s concurrence in the order denying rehearing en banc adds— and adds error — to the opinion it defends. The core of the error is Judge Fletcher’s analogy, that a church must comply with Title VII “just as a church is required to comply with state tort laws when a parishioner is sexually abused by a minister employed by the church.” This is a false analogy. The criminal and civil law applicable to sexual abuse of a parishioner does not regulate a church’s selection, training, and supervision of its own ministers. Judge Fletcher cannot seriously be suggesting that the state tort laws are analogous to Title VII. If so, then on his own terms he would favor a “church doctrine” affirmative defense to sexual abuse suits. To save him from this position, I offer the only tenable distinction to be found: that employment laws like Title VII transgress the constitutionally protected employment relationship between a church and its ministers, while state tort laws do not.
IV
Judge Kozinski accuses me of “shoehorning” church doctrine and ministers’ speech into the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses, as though this were a tight fit. The religion clauses were written as the first two protections of the Bill of Rights to protect freedom of religion. They are not idle chatter, mere mumbling before freedom of speech, the third protection.
The Free Exercise Clause is separate from the Freedom of Speech Clause, and has to be construed for that reason as adding additional protections, not as mere surplusage. Title VII regulation of ministers violates the Free Exercise Clause because people exercise their religious be*805liefs, both through their ministers who teach and guide their religious observance, and by creating and joining religious institutions of their choice.
Suppose a minister in his daily morning prayer were to thank God for making him a man and not a woman, as. he would in at least one religious tradition. Even his silent prayer might create a hostile environment for a woman such as Elvig, whose complaint addressed a pastor’s state of mind, when he allegedly “undressed her with his eyes.” Or suppose a minister takes the view, as some do, that the Bible requires women to occupy a subordinate position in the family, and that only men should be permitted to preach. If he repeatedly, in his public prayers, asks God to bring about such a world, and repeatedly tells his female associate pastor that the Bible compels these views, she will no doubt sense that the environment is hostile to her work and denies her equality because of her sex. Yet the pastor (and his church) are entitled to the free exercise of religion by spreading this view, which he and perhaps his sect understand to- be God’s word. These opinions and prayers are political heresy. But in matters of religion, churches get to define heresy, not the government.
Pastors will have to be squelched, perhaps by requiring churches to subject them, as so many corporations do, to “workshops” where they will learn what not to say and what not to pray, on pain of church discipline.38 If a male minister thinks certain marital or sexual conduct is sinful and repeatedly says so, in the hearing of a female associate pastor who engages in such conduct and has said so, he too will have to relearn his Bible.
V
Title VII regulation of ministers also violates the Establishment Clause. If applied to ministers, it. acts as a law “respecting an establishment of religion”39 in that it infringes on churches’ ability to train, ordain, hire, fire, and supervise their own ministers. Americans after our Revolution were unwilling to subject themselves to national government management of churches as had been maintained in England. The problem that the Establishment Clause addresses is not only government preference for a sect other than one’s own, but also government interference with the autonomy of any religious establishment, one’s own or another’s. Because churches commonly have their own teachings on the matters Title VII governs, and because enforcement of Title VII requires government entanglement in church doctrine and discipline, such regulation' is substantial and direct, not merely incidental. Churches, if substantially and directly regulated by Title VII, must become to a significant degree instrumentalities of the state, teaching its doctrines rather than theirs. '
VI
Usually our Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause cases come from the opposite direction, where religious people are attempting to express themselves in public or in the workplace, sometimes under the mantle of the government. But this case is no issue of symbolism, such as whether a creche is diluted enough not to be an endorsement because Santa Claus and a menorah are displayed along with it. *806Here we confront real government interference with how a church manages its ministers. There is no problem with religious freedom if ministers have to keep their pants on in the presence of choir members, but there is impermissible government entanglement if ministers have to be careful how they talk about sex and sex roles and what parts of their sacred texts they cite, considering how extensively most traditional religions deal with sex differences and sexuality. This government interference with core ministerial conduct is why this case evokes thoughts of Henry II and Thomas Beeket, and of Soviet control of Russian churches. The threat even of gentler interference, by Title VII compliance officers and lawsuits, is enough effectively to prohibit the free exercise of religion where it is in tension with contemporary views on equality of the sexes.
Our churches and their ministers are entitled to be free to propagate their religious views, under our Constitution. The religiosity of our population, compared with Europeans, facilitates the more libertarian government we enjoy. Our government can govern with a light hand partly because we the people are governed by our own strong sense of right and wrong. The religion clauses of the Constitution protect us from strife between sects, and between church and state. They also enable religious people to obtain the satisfaction of living virtuously in compliance with the tenets of their religions. Even those most hostile to one or another sect, or to all sects and to all religion, benefit from the religious freedom we enjoy, because competing power centers prevent the government from exercising a monopoly over the definition of vice and virtue. Our revolution, unlike the French, Mexican, and Russian revolutions, had no anti-clerical animus. Our First Amendment, far from restricting religion as those revolutions did, freed it both from government prohibition of free expression and from government management and preference for competing sects. We should have vindicated that religious freedom in this case.

. Oxford Dictionary of Quotations 332 (4th ed.1992).

. See the Constitutions of Clarendon, 1164, available at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/aval-on/medieval/constcla.htm, last visited January 24, 2005.

. Elvig v. Calvin Presbyterian Church, 375 F.3d 951 (9th Cir.2004).

. Bollard v. Cal. Province of the Soc'y of Jesus, 196 F.3d 940 (9th Cir.1999).

. Cf. Newdow v. U.S. Congress, 292 F.3d 597, 612 (9th Cir.2002) (holding that the teacher-led recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance including “under God” in public schools is unconstitutional), rev’d sub nom. Elk Grove Unified Sch. Dist. v. Newdow, 542 U.S. 1, 124 S.Ct. 2301, 159 L.Ed.2d 98 (2004).

. See Alicea-Hernandez v. Catholic Bishop of Chicago, 320 F.3d 698 (7th Cir.2003); Gellington v. Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, Inc., 203 F.3d 1299, 1304 (11th Cir.2000); Combs v. Cen. Tex. Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, 173 F.3d 343 (5th Cir.1999); EEOC v. Catholic Univ. of Am., 83 F.3d 455 (D.C.Cir.1996); Young v. N. Ill. Conference of United Methodist Church, 21 F.3d 184 (7th Cir.1994); Rayburn v. Gen. Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists, 772 F.2d 1164 (4th Cir.1985).

.The statutory exception to Title VII states “This subchapter shall not apply to an employer with respect to the employment of aliens outside any State, or to a religious corporation, association, educational institution, or society with respect to the employment of individuals of a particular religion to perform work connected with the carrying on by such corporation, association, educational institution, or society of its activities.” 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-1(a).

. U.S. Const, amend. I.

. Watson v. Jones, 80 U.S. (13 Wall.) 679, 20 L.Ed. 666 (1871).

. Id. at 729.

. Id. at 728.

. Id. at 735.

. Serbian E. Orthodox Diocese v. Milivojevich, 426 U.S. 696, 96 S.Ct. 2372, 49 L.Ed.2d 151 (1976).

. Id. at 708, 96 S.Ct. 2372.

. Id. at 724-25, 96 S.Ct. 2372.

. Elvig, 375 F.3d at 970 (9th Cir.2004).

. Elvig, 375 F.3d at 973.

. Watson, 80 U.S. at 727-28.

. Elvig, 375 F.3d at 959, 964.

. See Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 91 S.Ct. 2105, 29 L.Ed.2d 745 (1971).

. Employment Div., Dep’t of Human Res. of Oregon v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872, 110 S.Ct. 1595, 108 L.Ed.2d 876 (1990).

. See, e.g., McClure v. Salvation Army, 460 F.2d 553, 558-60 (5th Cir.1972).

. See Gellington, 203 F.3d at 1303; Combs, 173 F.3d at 349; Catholic Univ. of Am., 83 F.3d at 462.

. Combs, 173 F.3d at 345 n. 1, 350.

. Id. at 349.

. Id. at 350.

. Young, 21 F.3d at 187.

. Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 91 S.Ct. 2105, 29 L.Ed.2d 745 (1971).

. Gellington, 203 F.3d at 1304.

. Rayburn, 772 F.2d at 1169.

. Id. at 1171.

. Alicea-Hernandez, 320 F.3d at 703.

. Catholic Univ. of Am., 83 F.3d at 467-68.

. Id. at 467 (quoting Rayburn, 772 F.2d at 1171).

. Elvig, 375 F.3d at 971.

. Cf. Peterson v. Hewlett-Packard Co., 358 F.3d 599 (9th Cir.2004) (Corporation fired an employee for posting Biblical scriptures condemning homosexuality because the corporation viewed the employee's behavior as harassment).

. Judge W. Fletcher attempts to avoid the clear implications of Elvig for the hiring and firing that even he claims is constitutionally protected, by arguing that a “sexual harassment claim ... is not a claim based upon gender or racial inequality in hiring, firing, promotions, or duties.” That is incorrect. A sexual harassment claim under Title VII is indeed precisely what the quoted statement says it is not, a claim of employment discrimination based on sex. Title VII makes it an "unlawful employment practice" to "discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(a)(1). The Supreme Court construed Title VII to prohibit "sexual harassment” in Meritor Savings Bank, FSB v. Vinson, on the theory that where "discrimination based on sex has created a hostile or abusive work environment,” such a hostile environment "for members of one sex” is a "barrier to sexual equality at the workplace.” 477 U.S. 57, 66-67, 106 S.Ct. 2399, 91 L.Ed.2d 49 (1986) (internal quotation and citation omitted). If the Archbishop of Canterbury had killed one of the king's knights, or raped an altar boy, he would have faced trial under a murder or rape law of general applicability. That is not analogous to the case at bar because it has nothing to do with the church’s employment decisions regarding its ministers. If the king had gotten rid of the archbishop by instigating a nun’s claim that his prayers and interpretations of religious doctrine about sin had created a hostile environment for women, that would have been an employment discrimination claim analogous to the case at bar.

. Cf. Peterson, 358 F.3d at 602 (Employee’s posting of Biblical scriptures condemning homosexuality was perceived as violating the employer’s anti-harassment policy).

. U.S. Const, amend. I.