The Supreme Court unanimously ruled on June 29 that a lower court applied the wrong standard in a case about whether the U.S. Postal Service violated the constitutional rights of an evangelical Christian mail carrier when the agency refused to accommodate his wish not to work on the Sunday Sabbath.
The court raised the legal standard that employers will have to use to decide how much of a burden a request for a religious accommodation would impose on a business.
The ruling, which comes as the Supreme Court has become increasingly protective of First Amendment-based religious freedoms in recent years, interprets for the first time in many years a 46-year-old precedent known as Trans World Airlines (TWA) v. Hardison. The 1977 decision held that to reject an employee’s request for a religious accommodation under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the employer only needed to demonstrate that the accommodation would impose an “undue hardship on the conduct of the employer’s business.”…