In 1999, Cheryl Perich began service as a lay teacher at the Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School in Redford, Michigan.  A year later, she became a “called teacher,” selected by the congregation to serve as a commissioned minister and charged with duties of a more pastoral nature, such as teaching religion classes, leading the students in devotional exercises, and participating in weekly chapel functions, though continuing to teach predominantly secular subjects.

In June 2004, however, Perich developed symptoms of a medical disorder, eventually diagnosed as narcolepsy. Despite obtaining in February 2005 a doctor’s certification of her ability to return to work, the school had already made alternative arrangements and proposed that she resign her call. After she threatened legal action for alleged disability discrimination, the congregation then rescinded her call and she was duly terminated from her teaching position at the school.

Immediately she filed a charge of discrimination and retaliation with the EEOC, which eventually initiated a federal district court action against the school. Though the school prevailed at the district court level, it then lost before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Underlying the district court’s ruling, and rejected by the Court of Appeals, is a doctrine called the “ministerial exception.” Her case—and indeed the fate of the ministerial exception—are now before the U.S. Supreme Court, which granted review of the Sixth Circuit’s decision last spring and is scheduled to hear oral arguments on October 5.

What, then, is this “ministerial exception” and why is her case potentially of great significance? In essence the ministerial exception is a judge-made exemption from several federal civil rights statutes, such as Title VII and the Americans with Disabilities Act, that the courts believe is compelled by the Constitution’s religion clauses. The exemption extends to religious organizations’ employment decisions where the employee, regardless of his or her title, serves functions comparable to those of traditional clergy. Importantly, it is a categorical exemption, potentially barring suits alleging discrimination on any statutorily protected basis, including race and gender.

From the petitioner’s initial standpoint, as evidenced in its principal brief on the merits, the issue was simply the Sixth Circuit’s application (or, in its view, misapplication) of the exception. The respondent, however, has effectively challenged the validity of the exception itself, capitalizing on two critical realities: first, that the Supreme Court itself has never adopted the exception, even though every federal circuit court (beginning in the 1970s) has done so, and second, that the exception is seemingly at odds with the Supreme Court’s free exercise doctrine, which it substantially reworked in 1990. It thus comes as no surprise that the bulk of the petitioner’s reply brief only cursorily dwells on Cheryl Perich’s actual circumstances and instead spends most of its pages vigorously defending the exception itself.

Thus, all of a sudden, though not entirely unpredictably, the case has now become a vehicle for potentially abrogating over thirty years of lower court rulings. Will the Court view the exception as a misapplication of the Free Exercise Clause, which in 1990 it held does not ordinarily shield religious conduct from the application of neutral and generally applicable laws? Or will the Court view the exception as a viable component of the Establishment Clause insofar as the government is unduly entangling itself in the internal affairs of religious bodies? The fact that the lower courts have unanimously adopted the exception in one form or another is, to be frank, not necessarily the Court’s problem or concern, and the fact that the lower courts have grounded and conceptualized the doctrine in several ways only works against the supposed significance of their unanimity.

The October 5th oral arguments will ideally shed light on the Court’s inclinations, but given the stakes and the multi-tiered nature of the case, not to mention the very able counsel on both sides and a literal deluge of amicus briefs, the likelihood of such illumination is not great. The only definite aspect of the case, it seems, is that Cheryl Perich and her disability-related claims—the very genesis of the litigation—have become merely a secondary story in what is now a major contest over the First Amendment.