In Detwiler v. Mid-Columbia Medical Center, (9th Cir., Sept. 23, 2025), the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, affirmed a district court's dismissal of a suit under Title VII and a parallel Oregon statute brought by Sherry Detwiler, the medical center's Director of Health Information. Detwiler initially objected on religious grounds to her employer's Covid vaccine requirement. She was granted an exemption, conditioned, in part, on her having weekly antigen testing. She objected to that accommodation because she believed the ethylene oxide used in obtaining a nasal swab for the test was carcinogenic. She told her employer in part:
I have asked God for direction regarding the current COVID testing requirement. As I have prayed about what I should do, the Holy Spirit has moved on my heart and conscience that I must not participate in COVID testing that causes harm. If I were to go against the moving of the Holy Spirit, I would be sinning and jeopardizing my relationship with God and violating my conscience . . .
As a Christian protecting my body from defilement according to God’s law, I invoke my religious right to refuse any testing which would alter my DNA and has been proven to cause cancer. I find testing with carcinogens and chemical waste to be in direct conflict with my Christian duty to protect my body as the temple of the Holy Spirit.
Detwiler asked instead either for saliva testing or remote work. The majority said in part:
The Ninth Circuit has not yet endorsed a test for determining the nature, whether religious or secular, of a belief underlying a Title VII claim....
To survive a motion to dismiss, a plaintiff need not establish her belief is consistent, widely held, or even rational. However, a complaint must connect the requested exemption with a truly religious principle. Invocations of broad, religious tenets cannot, on their own, convert a secular preference into a religious conviction....
The District Court acknowledged the sincerity and religiosity of Detwiler’s belief in her body as a temple and even the implied prohibition on ingesting harmful substances. Therefore, at issue is Detwiler’s belief that the testing swab is harmful, and specifically that EtO is a carcinogen. This belief is personal and secular, premised on her interpretation of medical research. In essence, Detwiler labels a personal judgment based on science as a direct product of her general religious tenet. Yet, her alarm about the test swab is far too attenuated from the broad principle to treat the two as part of a single belief....
Invocation of prayer, without more, is still insufficient to elevate personal medical judgments to the level of religious significance.... Indeed, crediting every secular objection bolstered by a minimal reference to prayer as religious “would amount to a blanket privilege and a limitless excuse for avoiding all unwanted obligations.”
Judge VanDyke filed a dissenting opinion, saying in part:
By affirming the district court, the majority creates a circuit split. When faced with the question of whether religious objections to COVID-19 policies mirroring Detwiler’s objection were sufficiently pled, our sister circuits have consistently answered in the affirmative....
To work well, the majority’s mode of analysis must be capable of objective, impartial, and consistent application. If not, such analysis opens wide the door to the discriminatory treatment of religious beliefs. Those beliefs christened by a judge as “truly religious” will be protected, and those condemned as too mixed with “secular” beliefs will be left unprotected. The majority’s approach requires the impossible—we are judges, not theologians or philosophers. Judges are ill equipped to parse mixed claims into the “truly religious” and “purely secular” silos that the majority purports to discern....
Salem Reporter reports on the decision.
