Ninth Circuit Weighs Religious Hiring
The Ninth Circuit is deciding who a Christian charity may hire.
The Ninth Circuit heard arguments over whether a Christian homeless mission can hire only fellow believers, or whether a state can force it to apply that faith test to janitors and cooks alike. The case is a live candidate to reach the Supreme Court and reshape religious hiring nationwide.
At stake is whether a faith-based charity gets to define its own mission, or whether the government decides which of its jobs count as “religious” enough. For every church, ministry, and religious nonprofit in the nine-state circuit, the answer sets the rules for who they can put on payroll.
What happened
The full court took it up. All of the Ninth Circuit’s active judges heard the en banc argument in San Francisco on September 29, a rare step reserved for the most consequential cases.
A panel had sided with the mission. A three-judge panel ruled unanimously for Union Gospel Mission in January, before the full court vacated that win and granted rehearing in June.
The case info. It is Union Gospel Mission of Yakima v. Brown, No. 24-7246, with Washington Attorney General Nick Brown as the named defendant.
How it works
- The law narrows the exemption. Washington’s anti-discrimination law, as read by the state’s high court, lets a religious employer require shared faith only for “ministerial” roles, not for every job.
- The mission wants the whole house covered. Union Gospel Mission argues a religious charity must be able to require all staff to share the faith that defines its work.
- Unusual allies signed on. The Orthodox Jewish Aleph Institute filed in support of the Christian mission, warning that confining the exemption to “ministers” especially endangers minority faiths.
In Their Own Words
“It is difficult to imagine a decision that is more central to a religious organization than who is religiously qualified to carry out its religious mission.” Kristen Waggoner, head of Alliance Defending Freedom, argues for the mission.
What The Other Side Is Doing And How To Neutralize It
This fight splits cleanly along ideological lines, and the opposition is well organized. Washington’s position was argued by state Solicitor General Noah Purcell, who warned the court against giving religious employers “carte blanche to discriminate in hiring for any position, no matter how few religious duties it has.” Behind the state stands a coalition of Democratic attorneys general led by California’s Rob Bonta, whose office cast the mission’s claim as an attack on worker protections. The money and legal firepower on the other side flow through the blue-state AG offices and allied civil-rights groups that treat any religious carve-out as a loophole.
The good news is that the conservative religious-liberty bar is the strongest it has ever been, and this case is a chance to support it directly. Alliance Defending Freedom is lead counsel and the largest religious-liberty litigation shop in the country; the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which filed in support and won Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor, takes cross-faith cases that make the principle bulletproof. First Liberty Institute works the same terrain. For a donor, these are the organizations that carry cases like this one from a circuit courtroom to the Supreme Court, and the Aleph Institute’s involvement is the tell: when an Orthodox Jewish group funds the defense of a Christian mission, the issue is not any one faith’s privilege but whether the state or the believer defines the faith. That is an argument worth funding.
Looking forward
The question in this case is deceptively simple: who decides what is religious about a religious organization? Washington’s answer is that the government draws the line, protecting the pastor but not the person who runs the shelter the pastor preaches in. The mission’s answer is that a charity founded to do Christian work can ask the people doing the work to share the faith behind it. Conservatives should see the stakes clearly, because the logic that lets a state second-guess a homeless mission’s hiring is the same logic that can be turned on a church, a school, or a synagogue.
The Ninth Circuit is not the usual home of religious-liberty victories, which is why this one went to the full court and why it may not end here. If it reaches the Supreme Court, it will be because a coalition of believers who agree on little else agreed that this line belongs to them, not to the government.
Facts are prickly things,
-The Editors
Liberty · Upstream of the Swamp · October 1, 2026
