After a federal judge declared Chicago's Moody Bible Institute had merely used disagreements over religious teachings to cloak an allegedly discriminatory decision to fire a female instructor, Moody has now asked a federal appeals panel to weigh in on whether the judge improperly ignored U.S. Supreme Court rulings on the question of whether the First Amendment should protect the school against the fired instructor's claims of discrimination and retaliation.
Moody Bible Institute filed the notice of appeal on Sept. 13, indicating it was seeking intervention from the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in the legal dispute between plaintiff Janay Garrick and Chicago’s oldest evangelical Christian ministry school.
Garrick and Moody have been in court since 2018, when Garrick sued her former employer.
Garrick, who is an ordained minister, taught communications through Moody’s music and media arts division at the school’s campus in downtown Chicago from 2014-2017.
In her complaint, she accused Moody and its board of trustees of creating a hostile work environment and wrongly firing her. According to the complaint, she asserted Moody had hired her despite knowing she identified as an “egalitarian Christian,” a belief system which holds a freer view of the role of women in ministry within the church. The egalitarian belief system runs counter to the “complementarian” doctrines espoused by Moody, which generally restrict women from serving as pastors and in certain other ministry and leadership roles within a church or religious organization.
During her time at Moody, these doctrinal differences led to several clashes between Garrick and Moody administrators, beginning when a Moody vice president and associate provost allegedly instructed her to remove “ordained minister from her resume.” She said school administrators also did not inform her when she was hired that “she could claim a tax deduction for housing costs as an ordained minister.”
Garrick and school administrators also later allegedly clashed over Garrick’s advocacy on behalf of a lesbian student, who had allegedly gone to Garrick seeking to address concerns about “hostility” the student said she faced on campus. The student was later expelled.
When Garrick vocally opposed Moody’s exclusion of women from its School of Ministry, Garrick alleged she suffered “backlash” and “antagonism” from male colleagues and Moody administrators, who allegedly advised her to resign and leave Moody.
Garrick was ultimately terminated in April 2017, allegedly because she refused to align with Moody’s “doctrinal statement as it related to gender roles in ministry.”
Garrick accused Moody of violating Title VII of the federal civil rights law.
In 2019, Judge Lee initially sided with Moody, after the school said Garrick’s lawsuit should be disallowed under the American legal doctrine known as the “ministerial exception.” That principle generally accepts that churches and other religious organizations, like Moody Bible Institute, have the authority to hire and fire people a broad range of employees for reasons that in less religious employment settings would violate civil rights protections.
The ministerial exception, for instance, has been interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court to allow religious primary schools to fire teachers for professing or teaching beliefs contrary to the doctrines and beliefs espoused by the church with which the schools are affiliated.
The full Seventh Circuit recently ruled also that a gay man who had served as music minister at a Catholic Church in Chicago cannot sidestep the ministerial exception by attempting to press hostile work environment claims, rather than a direct assault on the church's decision to fire him for violating Catholic teachings on same sex relationships and marriage.
However, while Judge Lee initially agreed that the ministerial exception applied in Garrick’s case, he reversed that position in later proceedings.
In a decision issued in October 2020, Judge Lee said he believed the “religious reasons that Moody gave for Garrick’s termination” were nothing more than “a cover to discriminate against Garrick because of her gender.”
“By all accounts, the complementarian doctrine focuses on excluding women from serving as ministers,” Judge Lee wrote. “It does not follow that Moody’s faith requires unequal treatment of women who work in secular roles.”
Judge Lee than reaffirmed those findings in a decision issued Aug. 12, denying Moody’s request to reconsider his October decision.
On Aug. 12, Judge Lee explicitly declared he did not believe the ministerial exception should apply to Garrick’s claims, because he did not believe Garrick qualified as a “ministerial employee,” subject to the exception.
So long as plaintiffs, like Garrick, don’t use their legal proceedings to call “into question the value or truthfulness of religious doctrine,” they “will usually be able to challenge as pretextual the employer’s” reliance on those religious doctrines to justify their termination or other allegedly discriminatory or retaliatory actions.
“… When brought by a non-ministerial employee, such claims pose ‘no First Amendment problem,’” Judge Lee wrote.
That ruling triggered Moody’s appeal to the Seventh Circuit. In their notice of appeal, Moody said it would specifically seek to challenge Judge Lee’s findings in the October 2020 and August 2021 rulings, in which the judge denied their claims to protection under U.S. Supreme Court rulings pertaining to the ministerial exception and First Amendment prohibitions against judicial entanglement in the internal doctrinal and ministerial affairs of churches and religious organizations.
Moody is represented in the action by attorney Christian M. Poland, of the firm of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, of Chicago.
Garrick is representing herself in the proceedings.