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By Matthew J. Roberts, Associate General Counsel, Labor and Employment
In the workplace, employees with sincerely held religious beliefs often keep those beliefs to themselves. However, when a work requirement — such as a dress code, mandatory weekend shifts and vaccination policies — interferes with that belief, employers need to be ready to appropriately respond to employee accommodation requests.
Under California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA), when an employee notifies their employer that a work requirement conflicts with their sincerely held religious belief, the employer must engage in a good-faith, interactive process to determine whether the employer can reasonably accommodate their religious belief in the workplace. However, the employer is not obligated to begin this process until the employee notifies their employer of the existence of their sincerely held religious belief that conflicts with an employer’s workplace rules.
Recently, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals clarified that employees have a very low threshold to meet when providing notice under the FEHA’s notice requirement (Weiss v. The Permanente Medical Group, Inc., No. 24-6609 (July 24, 2026)).
Throughout the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mimi Weiss worked in a fully remote position for her employer. Identifying herself as a Christian Jew, Weiss claims that she adopted religious practices associated with Messianic Judaism in 2016 and recommitted to these practices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In August 2021, Weiss’s employer imposed a mandatory COVID-19 vaccination requirement for all its employees. Shortly after the imposed the mandate, Weiss requested an accommodation to avoid complying with the mandate because of her religious beliefs.
In her request for a religious accommodation, Weiss claims that her “religious beliefs as a Christian Jew do not allow [her] to receive a Covid-19 vaccine.” In support of her request, Weiss listed passages from the Old and New Testaments of the Bible that required her to “maintain h[er] body and blood uncontaminated” and that any needle wounds she would receive must be for “direct curative benefit.” According to Weiss, receiving the COVID-19 vaccine would violate these tenets of her religious beliefs.
After reviewing the request, her employer approved Weiss’s accommodation request to decline to participate in the vaccine mandate on a “provisional” basis. Three weeks later, the employer informed Weiss that she would need to provide supplemental information to substantiate her accommodation request. To justify seeking more information from Weiss, the employer asserted that some employees had engaged in a pattern of insincere religious accommodation requests related to the vaccine mandate.
Weiss was asked to respond to several additional inquiries regarding her religious beliefs including:
She was also informed that if she didn’t provide the requested information, the accommodation would be reevaluated based on the information the employer did have from her initial request.
Weiss didn’t completely answer the supplemental inquiries as she declined to answer any questions about taking other medications because she believed her medical information and history were private and protected information. Based on all the information the employer had from her initial request and her incomplete supplemental responses, Weiss’s accommodation was revoked, and she was placed on unpaid leave pending her receiving the COVID-19 vaccine.
Weiss alleged that she contacted several supervisors to get more information on why her accommodation was revoked and whether there was an appeals process. She claimed that she reaffirmed her religious beliefs and objections in this communication but never received a response. Weiss declined to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, and her employment was terminated for failing to comply with the vaccine mandate.
Weiss filed a lawsuit against her former employer asserting, amongst other issues, that her former employer had unlawfully failed to accommodate her religious beliefs and prevent religious discrimination and harassment under FEHA. The trial court dismissed Weiss’s lawsuit because it found that she had not provided adequate notice of the conflict between her religious beliefs and the workplace requirements.
Specifically, the trial court found her initial request and subsequent supplemental responses to be “generic explanations” that would have enabled Weiss a “limitless excuse for avoiding all unwanted obligations” and didn’t offer her former employer enough of a basis to evaluate the conflict between her religious beliefs and the vaccine mandate. Weiss appealed.
The Ninth Circuit focused its review solely on the issue of whether Weiss provided appropriate notice of the religious conflict under the law. Citing to its prior precedent in Heller v. EBB Auto Co., the Ninth Circuit reiterated that:
In Heller, an employee requested time off to attend his wife’s Jewish conversion ceremony. The employer eventually denied the employee’s time off, and when the employee took the time off anyway, his employment was terminated. The employer argued that the employee didn’t provide enough information about the nature of the ceremony and thus, the employer didn’t have enough information to evaluate the conflict. The Ninth Circuit rejected this argument because the employer knew that the employee was Jewish, that his wife was studying for Jewish conversion and that he requested an accommodation, time off from work in this case, to attend the religious ceremony.
The Ninth Circuit held that Weiss’s notice to her former employer is similar to the notice in Heller because in her request, she identified her religion and described specific religious tenets at issue that conflicted with the vaccine mandate. The Ninth Circuit was also persuaded by the employer’s own initial approval of the accommodation where the approval identified the accommodation request as a “religious-based” exemption.
While the Ninth Circuit limits its review to the notice requirement for religious accommodations, it did note that Weiss’s former employer was also challenging whether Weiss sincerely held the religious beliefs she asserted. While that inquiry was not at issue in this case, employers should be aware of the very limited availability of challenging whether an employee’s religious beliefs are sincerely held.
California and federal law both are clear that sincerely held religious beliefs don’t need to follow traditionally recognized religions and are individual to the person. For example, FEHA regulations defined “religious creed” to include “beliefs, observances, or practices, which an individual sincerely holds and which occupy in his or her life a place of importance parallel to that of traditionally recognized religions.”
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which enforces federal workplace religious protections, notes in its religious discrimination guidance that beliefs may be sincerely held even if they are inconsistently observed or deviate from commonly followed tenets of the employee’s stated religion. As a result, religious beliefs protected under the law are quite broad, and an employer best practice to avoid religious discrimination claims is to assume that the request is based on a sincerely held belief.
The EEOC guidance allows room for potential further inquiry into the sincerity of the religious belief, but the employer must have an objective basis for questioning the sincerity of the employee’s religious belief. Even if the employer does have an objective basis to question the sincerity of the religious belief, the EEOC’s guidance asserts that there is no specific form for the additional information and even a first-hand, written explanation from the employee may be sufficient.
Due to the limited nature of an employer’s ability to make additional inquiries into religious beliefs or whether they are sincerely held, any employer that has reason to question a reasonable accommodation request based upon religious beliefs should consult with legal counsel prior to requesting any additional information from the employee.
Once on notice that an employee may request an accommodation from a work requirement due to their religious beliefs, employers must promptly engage in a good-faith, interactive process to determine the nature of the conflict between the belief and the work requirement.
Much like the interactive process with employees requesting accommodation due to a disability, the religious accommodation process is unique to the facts and circumstances of each employee and should be conducted that way.
The interactive process should also be a collaborative and open process that allows the employee to fully explain their need for the accommodation while the employer fully explores what, if any, accommodation is necessary in this case.
Employers should always participate in the interactive process with an eye toward ensuring that the employee’s religious belief, observance or practice does conflict with a job duty, and if so, the most effective way to resolve that conflict. While going through the interactive process, the employer should document the entire process — start to finish.
If a reasonable accommodation is available, the employer must provide it for the employee. However, the employer does not need to provide the exact accommodation the employee requests if the employer has an effective alternative that will resolve the conflict between the religious beliefs or practices and the work requirements.
Additionally, employers are not required to provide an accommodation if it would create an undue hardship on the employer. Under California law, an employer can claim an accommodation constitutes an undue hardship if providing the accommodation would require “significant difficulty or expense.” Whether the accommodation will impose significant difficulty or expense on an employer is evaluated based on the following factors:
Employers should be aware this is a difficult burden for the employer to demonstrate and is unique to each employer based on the factors above. Employers who believe an accommodation will create an undue hardship should consult with legal counsel prior to denying an accommodation for this reason.