Your exemption request mentioned more than religion. The Seventh Circuit says that's fine.

Your exemption request mentioned more than religion. The Seventh Circuit says that's fine.

There was a trap in the exemption process that a lot of people walked into without knowing it.

You sat down to write your request. You explained your religious objection. And then, because you were being honest, and because you'd been reading, and because you were worried, you added a paragraph about the vaccine's newness, or the testing, or a health concern of your own.

Then the denial came back and said your request was really about medical concerns, not religion. Not a religious accommodation request at all. Denied.

The Seventh Circuit addressed that argument in July 2024, and rejected it.

The case

Christine Bube and Connie Hedrington were registered nurses at Aspirus, a nonprofit hospital system based in Wausau, Wisconsin. In November 2021, Aspirus adopted a COVID-19 vaccine mandate. Both nurses requested religious exemptions. Both were denied. Both were terminated.

The district court dismissed their Title VII claims. The question that reached the Seventh Circuit was narrow but consequential: what does a plaintiff have to plead to establish that they sought a religious accommodation in the first place?

Because if the request isn't religious, Title VII never enters the picture. The employer doesn't have to accommodate anything. The case ends before anyone asks whether accommodation was possible.

What the court held

Bube v. Aspirus Hospital, Inc., 108 F.4th 1017 (7th Cir. 2024).

The Seventh Circuit held that an employee seeks a religious accommodation when the request, by its terms, is plausibly based at least in part on some aspect of their religious belief or practice.

At least in part. That is the phrase that does the work.

A request does not stop being religious because it also mentions secular concerns. It does not fail because you were candid about being worried on more than one front. Human beings hold layered reasons for the things they do, and Title VII does not require you to have filed a doctrinally pure request in order to be protected by it.

The court's own summary was blunt: "Having already determined that the plaintiffs' requests are based in part on religion, our analysis need go no further. We REVERSE and REMAND for further proceedings."

The court decided a companion case the same day, Passarella and Dottenwhy v. Aspirus, Inc., Nos. 23-1660 and 23-1661, on related reasoning.

What this decision does and does not do

The same precision applies here as everywhere else in this area.

Bube is a reversal of a dismissal. The Seventh Circuit did not hold that Aspirus violated Title VII, did not award anything to anyone, and did not decide whether accommodating these nurses would have imposed an undue hardship on the hospital. Those questions go back to the district court.

What the decision does is remove a threshold argument that had been ending these cases early, and in this litigation, ending early was how employers won.

Why this pairs with Ringhofer

Read Bube alongside the Eighth Circuit's decision in Ringhofer v. Mayo Clinic Ambulance, 102 F.4th 894 (8th Cir. 2024), and a pattern comes into focus.

Two federal circuits, within roughly two months of each other, rejected two different versions of the same move: the employer, and then the district court, looking at a religious objection and deciding it didn't count. In Ringhofer the objection supposedly wasn't consistent enough. In Bube it supposedly wasn't purely religious enough.

Neither is the standard. The standard is sincerity, and a request grounded at least in part in religious belief is a religious request.

For anyone whose case was dismissed on either theory, that matters, and it matters most if you are still inside the window to do something about it.

If this describes your situation

If your exemption request mentioned both faith and safety, and you were told it therefore wasn't religious, the reasoning behind that denial has been rejected by the Seventh Circuit.

Whether you can still act on that depends almost entirely on timing. Title VII charges generally must be filed with the EEOC within 300 days of the adverse action in Minnesota; Minnesota Human Rights Act claims generally within one year. If your case was dismissed and you are within the window to appeal, that window is measured in days, not months.

We'll tell you on the first call, at no charge, whether we think you still have a case. If the answer is no, we'll say so.

MKLaw represented the plaintiffs in Bube v. Aspirus Hospital, Inc.

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