Abstract

In its recent ruling Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, the U.S. Supreme Court expanded the range of the ministerial exception to include two lay teachers who claimed that their faith-based employers discriminated against them on the basis of age and disability. The Court held that employment discrimination law does not apply to employees who play a key role in religious organizations, even though they hold neither a religious title nor religious training. The present paper analyzes the ministerial exception, its goals and its limits and the difficulty to reconcile the protection of religious organizations’ First Amendment rights with employees’ claims of discrimination in the workplace