Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, DISCRIMINATION—RELIGIOUS—9th Cir.: Hospital employee’s objection to COVID swab not a bona fide religious belief, (Sep 24, 2025)

By Todd Harrison, J.D.

“Invocation of prayer, without more, is still insufficient to elevate personal medical judgments to the level of religious significance”.

Affirming a district court’s dismissal of an employee’s Title VII and state-law religious discrimination claims, a divided Ninth Circuit panel held that the employee failed to plead a bona fide religious belief that conflicted with her employer’s rule requiring COVID-19 vaccinations. Although the employer approved the employee’s request for a religious exemption from the vaccine mandate, it refused to accommodate her when she balked at submitting to a weekly swab test because she believed the testing swab was carcinogenic. The court found this belief to be personal and secular, premised not on religious beliefs but on the employee’s interpretation of medical research. Dissenting, Judge VanDyke wrote that the court should follow other circuits in adopting a more permissive view of a plaintiff’s asserted religious beliefs (Detwiler v. Mid-Columbia Medical Center, No. 23-3710 (9th Cir. Sept. 23, 2025)).

The employee in this case worked as a privacy officer and director of health information at an Oregon hospital from September 14, 2020, through December 21, 2021.

Religious exemption. On September 28, 2021, the employee sought a religious exemption from the hospital’s policy implementing the Oregon Health Authority’s administrative rule requiring healthcare workers to be vaccinated against COVID. She asserted that her Christian anti-abortion beliefs and beliefs against the introduction of harmful substances into her body conflicted with the requirement. The hospital approved her religious exemption request on October 1, 2021.

Accommodations. As part of its religious accommodation, the hospital required the employee to wear personal protective equipment while in the office and to submit to weekly nasal swab testing. The employee requested a further accommodation, this time seeking an exemption from the weekly swab testing. She informed the hospital that she had found multiple sources indicating that the ethylene oxide swabs are dipped in is a carcinogenic substance. She also cited to her belief that her body is a “temple of God,” and stated that she had prayed for guidance on this matter. As an alternative accommodation, she proposed that the hospital allow her to either submit to saliva testing or to allow her to work remotely full-time.

Rejecting the employee’s request for further accommodations, the hospital explained that saliva testing was impracticable because it takes too long to get results and allowing her to work remotely full-time would create a hardship for her team. The employee was given until December 20, 2021, to agree to swab testing or to be reassigned. Because she did neither, her employment was terminated at the end of that day.

Lawsuit. Subsequently, the employee filed this lawsuit. Her complaint was dismissed for failure to state a claim, with the district court adopting in full a magistrate judge’s findings and recommendations that although the complaint was “couche[d] in religious terms,” it had demonstrated her request for accommodation was based on her “secular, non-religious belief that nasal swab testing contains hazardous materials.” This appeal followed.

Unadorned conclusion. At the outset, the court noted that the Ninth Circuit has not yet endorsed a test for determining the religious or secular nature of a belief underlying a Title VII claim. While the employee in this case would embrace a standard by which a pleading passes muster whenever a practice is labeled “religious,” the court stated that “a complaint must do more than rest on an unadorned conclusion.”

Permissive standard. Urging the court to adopt a permissive standard for assessing the nature of a Title VII claimant’s beliefs, the employee pointed to other circuits that have adopted such an approach in the employment discrimination context, wherein a complaint is allowed to survive with merely conclusory statements about the religious nature of a belief. “However, such a standard contravenes federal pleading requirements and elevates claims of religious discrimination over all other prayers for relief,” said the court.

Personal and secular. The district court had acknowledged the sincerity and religiosity of the employee’s belief in her body as a temple and even the implied prohibition on ingesting harmful substances. Thus, the issue was her belief that the testing swab was harmful. The court here found this belief to be personal and secular, based on the employee’s interpretation of medical research.

In essence, explained the court, the employee labeled a personal judgment based on science as a direct product of her general religious tenet, and her alarm about the test swab was “far too attenuated” from the broad principle to treat the two as part of a single religious belief.

Without her opinion that the swab is harmful, the employee had no conflict with the hospital’s testing requirement, observed the court. Her secular judgment provided the sole basis for her objection. Her concerns about the purportedly harmful nature of the swab had no relationship with her religious beliefs.

Bolden-Hardge. Next, the employee argued that the district court improperly determined that her belief was secular in contravention of the Ninth Circuit’s recent opinion in Bolden-Hardge v. Off. of Cal. State Controller, 63 F.4th 1215 (9th Cir. 2023). However, explained the court, Bolden-Hardge examined whether the plaintiff’s religious belief conflicted with her employment duty, rather than the religious nature of the objection itself. The district court here acted in accordance with this holding, examining the employee’s prima facie case for a religious belief in conflict with her employment duties. The employee failed to meet that minimal burden here, said the court.

Circuit split. Beyond Bolden-Hardge, the employee pointed to decisions from other circuits in support of her proposed lenient standard. However, the court here found that other circuits’ grant of Title VII protections to the secular implementation of high-level, religiously-inspired goals to be far too permissive a threshold. “Invocation of prayer, without more, is still insufficient to elevate personal medical judgments to the level of religious significance,” said the court.

To allow the employee’s claim to go forward, continued the court, would open the door to unlimited religious discrimination claims. Further, the employee proffered no limiting principle within her proposed standard. Therefore, courts in the Ninth Circuit must hold assertions of religious belief to the routine plausibility standard and examine whether there is any nexus between religion and a plaintiff’s viewpoint, said the court.

In this instance, the employee, by asserting a general religious principle and linking that principle to her personal, medical judgment via prayer alone, did not state a claim for religious accommodation, concluded the court, affirming the lower court’s dismissal of the employee’s claims.

Dissent. Dissenting, Judge VanDyke contended that the majority adopted a flawed mode of analysis purporting to distinguish a category of “purely secular” claims incidentally linked to “a general religious principle” from “truly religious claims.” According to the judge, such an approach is unworkable and will embroil courts in resolving intractable questions about how much of a claimant’s religiously motivated objection is “truly religious,” versus how much of the objection derives from an erroneous “personal judgment based on science.” The judge instead would follow the majority of other circuits that have applied a more permissive standard to similar claims.

The case is No. 23-3710.

Judge: Seeborg, R.

Attorneys: Matthew McReynolds (Pacific Justice Institute) for Sherry H. Detwiler. William Greg Lockwood (Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani) for Mid-Columbia Medical Center and Cheri McCall.

Companies: Mid-Columbia Medical Center

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