Difficulties in Dealing with Religious Harassment

Eemployers that receive complaints of religious harassment have a serious dilemma on their hands: restrict the expression of religious belief and risk a discrimination lawsuit by the accused harasser, or do nothing (or don’t do enough) to stop the harassment and risk a religious harassment lawsuit by the alleged victim. This dilemma is not unlike that faced by the employer threatened with lawsuits by both the alleged victim of sexual harassment and the alleged perpetrator who is terminated for sexual harassment. The difference here is that the lawsuit advanced by the employee fired for religious harassment may assert not only wrongful discharge, but religious discrimination as well. So where--and how--should employers draw the line between protected religious speech and illegal religious harassment? Another recent case demonstrates what it may take to cross that line. In Venters v. City of Delphi, 123 F.3d 956 (7th Cir. 1997), Jennifer Venters had worked as a radio dispatcher in the Delphi, Ind., police department for six years when a new police chief, Larry Ives, was installed. Ives told everyone in the department that he had been sent by God to Delphi to save as many people from damnation as he could. He made clear that the police department was "God’s house" and that employees would have to play by "God’s rules." Ives repeatedly urged Venters to attend his church and view his religious videotapes. He sharply criticized her personal life--she shared a house with another unmarried woman--and publicly accused her of entertaining male police officers with pornographic videos and engaging in incest and bestiality. Claiming that an evil spirit had taken Venters’ soul, Ives told her she could choose God’s way or Satan’s, and that if she chose Satan’s way, she could no longer work for the city. After Venters complained to the city council president, Ives fired Venters on what Venters claimed were trumped-up charges of poor performance. Venters brought suit under Title VII. The 7th Circuit reversed summary judgment, and held that Venters had successfully made a case of religious harassment, based not only on a hostile environment theory, but, for the first time, on a quid pro quo theory. In a very literal sense, the court concluded, Ives had "conditioned [Venters’] continued employment on the state of her ‘salvation.’" The court ruled that Ives’ extreme actions and statements had crossed the line from protected religious expression to illegal religious harassment. The moral of the story may be, perhaps, that all proselytizing is not created equal. On one side of the spectrum is Isaiah Brown, whose relatively gentle style of proselytizing consisted of regularly asserting his beliefs to his employees, and who was determined not to have harassed anyone but merely to have engaged in protected religious expression. Larry Ives represents the other extreme, a supervisor who directly and expressly threatened an employee’s job. But what about that huge gray area in between the two extremes, where the supervisor’s aggressive approach toward one employee does not happen to include quid pro quo threats of termination?