Why religious accommodation cases die at the motion to dismiss

Why religious accommodation cases die at the motion to dismiss

This post is written mainly for other lawyers, though anyone with a dismissed case will find it useful.

If you handled a religious accommodation case arising out of an employment mandate, you already know the pattern. The case did not fail at summary judgment after a fight over undue hardship. It did not fail in front of a jury. It failed on a Rule 12(b)(6) motion, often within a few months of filing, on a ground that had nothing to do with whether the employer could have accommodated your client.

Understanding why is worth doing, because in the last two years three circuit decisions have unsettled the reasoning that produced those dismissals.

The three exits

District courts dismissing these cases generally took one of three doors.

Door one: the belief isn't really religious. The plaintiff's objection was characterized as medical, philosophical, or political. This was especially common where the exemption request mentioned vaccine safety, testing timelines, or personal health alongside the religious objection. The court read the secular content as the true motivation and the religious content as a wrapper.

Door two: the belief is religious but doesn't conflict with the policy. The court accepted the sincerity of the belief and then held the plaintiff had failed to plausibly plead how it actually collided with what the employer required , frequently reasoning that the belief was internally inconsistent, or that the plaintiff had accepted other vaccines, or that the connection to fetal cell lines was too attenuated.

Door three: no adverse action. The plaintiff resigned or retired rather than be terminated, and the court treated that as voluntary.

Each of these is a threshold question. Each ends the case before discovery. And in each, the court is making a determination about the plaintiff's religious beliefs, at the pleading stage, on the papers, without evidence.

What the circuits said

Door one: closed by Bube. In 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 an aspect of religious belief or practice. A request containing secular content alongside religious content is still a religious request. The court reversed and remanded, and decided a companion case, Passarella and Dottenwhy v. Aspirus, Inc., the same day.

Door two: closed by Ringhofer. In Ringhofer v. Mayo Clinic Ambulance, 102 F.4th 894 (8th Cir. 2024), the Eighth Circuit held that beliefs "do not have to be uniform across all members of a religion or acceptable, logical, consistent, or comprehensible to others." Internal consistency is not the test. Denominational endorsement is not the test. The court also held the Minnesota Human Rights Act reaches failure-to-accommodate claims, and reversed on exhaustion grounds as to two plaintiffs.

Door three: narrowed by Brokken. In Brokken v. Hennepin County, 140 F.4th 445 (8th Cir. 2025), the Eighth Circuit held that retiring rather than comply, where non-compliance meant termination and the loss of more than 1,285 banked hours of vacation, sick, and comp time, could constitute an adverse employment action at the pleading stage. The court also affirmed dismissal of a claim under Minn. Stat. § 12.39, holding that the statute carries only a criminal penalty and creates no private right of action. Worth knowing before you plead it.

What this does not mean

It does not mean these cases are easy now, and it would be a disservice to suggest otherwise.

All three decisions are reversals at the pleading stage. Each returned a case to the district court. None held that the employer violated Title VII, and none reached the undue hardship analysis that will decide many of these cases on the merits, an analysis that has its own difficulties in a healthcare setting.

What changed is the threshold. Arguments that were ending these cases in month three now have to survive circuit authority pointing the other way. For a case in the Seventh or Eighth Circuit that was dismissed on one of those three grounds, that is a materially different posture on appeal than it was in 2023.

A note on why appeals are their own practice

Most plaintiff-side employment lawyers do not maintain an appellate practice, and there is no reason they should. The work is different: the record is closed, the standard of review does most of the analytical work, the audience is three judges rather than a jury, and the deadlines are unforgiving. A notice of appeal in a civil case where the United States is not a party is generally due 30 days from entry of judgment.

If you are holding a dismissal in one of these cases and the reasoning matches one of the three doors described above, it is worth a conversation before that window closes. We take these as co-counsel and as referrals, and we are equally willing to tell you an appeal isn't there.

If you're the client rather than the lawyer

The short version: if your case was dismissed because a court decided your beliefs weren't consistent enough, weren't purely religious enough, or because you resigned instead of waiting to be fired, federal appellate courts have recently rejected each of those grounds in published decisions.

The appeal window is short. If you have a dismissal order from the last several weeks, that is the call to make now.

MKLaw represented the plaintiffs in Ringhofer, Bube, and Brokken.

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