Religious Vaccine Objections to Clash With Employer Defense

Workers seeking religious exemptions from Covid-19 vaccine mandates must overcome the U.S. Supreme Court’s employer-friendly precedent that allows businesses to reject those requests if they’re too burdensome.

Employers need only show that the requested religious accommodation would cause more than a trivial cost to their operations, under the high court’s 1977 ruling in TWA v. Hardison. That “undue hardship” standard has been criticized as too low by academics, religious groups, the U.S. Justice Department, and some federal judges.

The high court has pending petitions asking it to revisit its standard for determining if a religious accommodation is an undue ...