AI Religious Objections at Work Emerge as New Employer Concern

Artificial intelligence in the workplace has employers grappling with a new legal issue: whether to accommodate employees seeking exemptions from using the technology because of their religion.

Companies should seriously consider such requests, especially after a recent US Supreme Court ruling lowering the threshold for approving religious accommodation bids, law professors and labor attorneys said.

Ever expanding AI capacities mean use cases that are inconceivable today may be tangible within six months, making employers’ consideration of accommodations an evolving question, said Whittney Barth, executive director of the Emory University Center for the Study of Law and Religion.

“Both religion and technology are dynamic, so the possibilities are numerous,” Barth said.

About 50 to 55% of jobs in the US will be reshaped by AI in the next two to three years, meaning workers will retain similar roles but face new expectations for the work they produce, according to a recent report published by the Boston Consulting Group.

Statements that faith groups and religious leaders are releasing about AI in the workplace could influence potential religious accommodations, Barth said.

The Vatican last year issued formal AI guidance for Catholic institutions that emphasized “moral responsibility grounded in the dignity and vocation of the human person.” AI should “never degrade creativity or reduce workers to mere ‘cogs in a machine,’” the guidance said.

The Southern Baptist Church in 2023 adopted a resolution that said “human dignity must be central to any ethical principles” for uses of these emerging technologies.

Religious accommodation issues are likely to emerge on top of existing employer concerns about mitigating bias in AI hiring tools, and accessibility concerns for employees with disabilities, said Seyfarth Shaw LLP partner Michael Steinberg.

Religious Beliefs

Potential objections could stem from a company’s use of AI-enabled technology that workers say goes against their faith, such as a social media algorithm that’s been tied to suicide or tools being used to target immigrants, said Michael LeRoy, a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign College of Law.

But workers’ objections don’t need to be based on specific AI concerns raised by faith leaders or by what’s found directly in religious texts. They need only be “bona fide” under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Workers may cite broad religious beliefs, from the very concept of the nature of work, to views about worshiping idols, Steinberg said.

“That is something you could absolutely see, and I would expect to see, as AI continues to produce all of these remarkable innovations and changes that we are only just beginning to appreciate,” he said.

In 2015, a Virginia federal jury awarded over half a million dollars in a religious discrimination lawsuit brought by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against a coal company that denied accommodation to a worker who objected to a biometric hand scanner that tracked employee time and attendance.

The worker said he was forced to quit, as the tool violated his beliefs as an evangelical Christian based on his view that the hand scanning technology would leave him with the “mark of the beast” associated with the Antichrist in the Book of Revelation.

The decision is “a real clarion call to employers not to make a judgment on the sincerity of the religious belief,” LeRoy said.

Courts don’t require workers objecting based on religion to cite where in their faith it states a belief, as was the case with Covid-19 vaccine requirement objections, that likely stemmed from modern extensions of older religious views, LeRoy said.

“Religion is defined broadly. It doesn’t mean you need to belong to a church. It’s just something that occupies someone’s life and spirit,” said Jenny Yang, a partner at Outten and Golden LLP and former EEOC chair.

The protections under Title VII leave room for workers to have varied protected religious beliefs, or even a lack thereof, as atheists have also successfully sued over religious accommodations if forced to partake in prayer activities at work.

“Even if only one person holds the belief, the EEOC has held you can have a sincerely held belief that’s unique to a single individual, and also protects people who don’t believe in religion, or atheism, as well,” Yang said.

Court Precedent

Rejecting AI exemption requests will likely be more challenging for employers following the Supreme Court’s 2023 Groff v. DeJoy decision, which raised the bar for them to deny a religious accommodation at work. To prove it’s an undue hardship, they must now show it would result in “substantial increased costs” to the enterprise.

The lowered undue hardship standard has fueled Title VII suits over workplace vaccine mandates, days off for religious observance, the wearing of beards, and pronoun usage.

Federal circuit courts are still considering what the post-Groff undue hardship test for employers might look like. The First Circuit has espoused a fact-specific approach that reflects the nature, size, and operating costs of a business.

The balance employers will need to strike is whether the accommodation will result in substantial cost, rather than weighing the religious beliefs a worker is stating, labor attorneys and law professors said.

That decision will also depend on the job role, and the accommodation calculus is likely to change as more industries put AI more at the center of their businesses. For example, it may be harder to reasonably accommodate an engineer than it would be for a worker who tangentially uses AI tools, Barth said.

But even as employers currently bear the legal responsibility to accommodate many religious beliefs, the rise in AI use for more tasks may make it easier for companies to prove it would be an undue burden to grant employees a pass from working with it.

“There might be accommodations that are reasonable today that may not be reasonable to the same employer in a year from now,” Steinberg said.