Keeping the Faith: Religious Accommodation and the Public Agency Employer

Although personal in nature, an employee’s religious beliefs and practices are treated much differently than other personal employee activities. Local government employers can restrict many secular employee personal activities at work (like the use of personal email or social media while working).

Many employers limit such activities to maintain personal and professional boundaries and to help ensure workplace productivity and efficiency, but religious activities of employees in the workplace are given much stronger legal protection, and they can impose corresponding legal duties on employers.

This two-part blog series examines these issues and recent important cases related to employee religious beliefs and practices at work.

Employee Religious Beliefs and Practices Are Legally Protected in the Workplace

Both federal and state law prohibit government employers from discriminating against employees because of religion. The Federal Civil Rights Act defines an employee’s “religion” as “all aspects of religious observance and practice, as well as belief,” and makes employer religious discrimination an unlawful employment practice. See 42 U.S.C. §2000e-2(a).

The Washington Law Against Discrimination (WLAD) similarly prohibits Washington employers from discriminating against employees based on “creed,” which courts equate to religion. See RCW 49.60.180 and Kumar v. Gate Gourmet (2014).

These laws protect employees from religious discrimination by the employer at all phases of the employment relationship, from hiring to promotion and work assignments, to separation and discharge.

Employers Are Required to Accommodate Employee Religious Beliefs and Practices

In addition to prohibiting religious discrimination, federal law also requires employers to reasonably accommodate employee religion in the workplace. See 42 U.S.C. §2000e(j).

In its 2014 decision in Kumar v. Gate Gourmet, the Washington Supreme Court followed federal religious discrimination law and held that the WLAD similarly obligates employers to reasonably accommodate employee religion at work.

What are some examples of religious workplace accommodations?

Examples of reasonable workplace religious accommodations can vary as much as individuals and their specific beliefs, but guidance from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) lists common types of accommodations, such as allowing for:

• work schedule changes (for religious holidays or observances);
• the use of employer rooms or workplace areas for religious prayer or meditation; and/or
• exceptions to employer dress or grooming policies for religious reasons.

These are not exhaustive examples, and EEOC guidance notes that “a wide variety of changes can potentially be reasonable religious accommodations.” Accordingly, local government employers may have to evaluate the reasonableness of many types of religious accommodation requests. See also 29 C.F.R. §1605.2(d).

How do employees request religious-based accommodation?

The law puts the onus on employees to request religious accommodations from employers and requires employees asserting failure to accommodate claims to prove (amongst other things) that they “informed the employer” of their religious beliefs and how their beliefs conflicted with work obligations. Accordingly, employers should not affirmatively ask an employee if they need religious accommodation—they should instead wait for the employee’s request.

EEOC guidance states that employee religious accommodation requests need not be written and require no specific “magic words” to notify the employer of a religious-based accommodation need. See 29 C.F.R. §1605.2(c)(1) and EEOC guidance.

Although no formal written request is required, a good practice for local government employers is to adopt policies for using written forms or other documentation for employee religious accommodation requests (Such policies have become increasingly common in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic: Readers can find several examples in MRSC's Sample Document Library).

Must Employers Approve All Religious Accommodation Requests?

The simple answer is “No.” Employers are required to reasonably accommodate employee requests, but not every request will automatically qualify for an employer’s accommodation. Two important legal principles determine whether employers must accommodate a religious accommodation request:

1. The request is supported by an employee's “bona fide” religious beliefs, and
2. Accommodation of the request does not pose an "undue hardship" to the employer.

What constitutes a bona fide religious belief?

Employees must support accommodation requests with a “bona fide” (or sincerely held) religious belief that conflicts with their employment duties. This requirement gives employers a limited ability to investigate the reasons behind an employee’s requested accommodation, but employers still have a very delicate and difficult task in judging the sincerity of employee religious beliefs.

Following legal principles separating church and state, courts frequently shy away from firmly defining when employee religious beliefs are sufficiently bona fide to warrant an employer’s accommodation.

In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that individual religious beliefs are protected from discrimination regardless of whether the beliefs are acceptable, logical, consistent, or comprehensible to others. See Fulton v. City of Philadelphia (2021).

The Washington Court of Appeals recently commented on this lack of legal guidance in Henry v. Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife (2025), noting:

There is no in-jurisdiction case law explaining what a ‘bona fide religious belief’ is. Instead, the rule appears to merely require that an employee assert a plausible religious belief that conflicts with employment duties.

Detwiler v. Mid-Columbia Medical Center

Despite legal uncertainty, the 2025 ruling in Detwiler v. Mid-Columbia Medical Center offers some helpful insight. The case involved hospital employee Detwiler’s objection to the hospital’s COVID vaccination requirement for employees.

The hospital allowed Detwiler to take a nasal swab COVID test in lieu of vaccination, but Detwiler objected to the swab and requested different accommodations because medical research showed harmful carcinogens in the swab and ingesting it conflicted with her religious duty to avoid defiling her body as “a temple of the holy spirit.”  The hospital refused Detwiler’s further accommodation requests and ultimately terminated her. Detwiler sued the hospital for failure to accommodate.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals determined that Detwiler only advanced secular beliefs to support her claim, instead of a bona fide religious belief. In an opinion that provides important guideposts for evaluating employee requests for religious accommodation, the court held that employee requests must express religious beliefs that are specific enough to distinguish them from secular beliefs. 

While carefully noting that employees do not have to prove “consistent, widely held, or even rational” religious beliefs, the court nonetheless held that employees must base accommodation requests on “truly religious principles.” An employee’s broad invocations of religious tenets are insufficient by themselves to “convert a secular preference into a religious conviction.”

The court also stated that employees can support accommodation requests with overlapping religious and secular objections as long as the request involves a sufficient religious component. The hospital’s swab test requirement conflicted with Detwiler’s beliefs, but in the court’s mind those beliefs were based on Detwiler’s “interpretation of medical research” and personal judgments “based on science” rather than on Detwiler’s religious principles.

While Detwiler’s request failed to meet the bona fide belief standard, the court also declared that when an employee’s expressed religious belief does meet the standard “courts may not substitute their own judgment for that of the believer’s.” In that instance, employers must then initiate good faith efforts to either grant the employee’s requested accommodation or show that they cannot grant it due to undue hardship.

Conclusion

The second blog in this series focuses on the undue hardship principle as it applies to workplace-based religious accommodation requests and how this principle has been interpreted in recent federal and state-based court cases.