Christian Shelter Challenges ‘Tyrannical’ Washington Law Infringing on Right to Hire Likeminded Staffers

Mike Johnson views the Yakima Union Gospel Mission in Washington as something like “an adult orphanage” for grownups, many of whom were neglected and abused as children.

A large number of the people they serve come from broken homes, ravaged by addiction. Most started drinking or abusing drugs before they were teenagers and have never really known the comfort that comes from healthy, safe, and loving family relationships, Johnson said.

That’s why Johnson, the gospel mission’s CEO, believes that he and his more than 150 Christian colleagues are akin to a “do-over family” for their clients, many of whom live on the streets.

“We deeply believe that the image of God in a person can’t be destroyed by how many dumb, bad, or broken decisions we make,” Johnson told National Review. “Our mission is to follow Jesus in how we help people move from homelessness to wholeness. And so, the religious purposes of the organization are fundamentally fulfilled by how we, the staff, live out our beliefs with each other and on behalf of the folks that we serve.”

Throughout its nearly 90-year history, the nonprofit’s “do-over family” has been staffed exclusively by Christians who believe in and live out its mission, everyone from top leaders and outreach workers to cooks and staffers working behind the scenes.

But the state of Washington no longer allows religious nonprofits like the Yakima Union Gospel Mission to limit its hiring to just likeminded believers after the state’s supreme court reinterpreted the Washington Law Against Discrimination in 2021.

While “ministerial” positions are still exempt from WLAD under the 2021 ruling, religious organizations like the gospel mission are now prohibited from discriminating against protected classes of people for non-ministerial jobs.

For the gospel mission, that means they can no longer require that non-ministerial staffers abide by the organization’s teachings about marriage and sex, specifically, abstaining from sex outside of a biblical marriage between one man and one woman.

In the wake of the ruling, Washington’s attorney general, Robert Ferguson, began investigating religious organizations with lifestyle expectations that could be deemed discriminatory based on sexual orientation. He’s encouraged people to file complaints with his civil-rights team.

Last March, Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative legal firm, filed a federal lawsuit on the Yakima Union Gospel Mission’s behalf calling for the court to affirm the mission’s right to hire people who agree with its efforts and share the mission’s beliefs. The defendants are Ferguson and leaders of the state’s human rights commission.

In September, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit on standing grounds, alleging that it was a veiled attempt to seek appellate review of the state supreme ruling on WLAD, according to a report in the Yakima Herald-Republic. ADF and the gospel mission have since appealed to the Ninth Circuit, hoping the court will hear the case and issue an injunction in early 2024.

Since 1936, the Yakima Union Gospel Mission has been critical to aiding the community’s neediest residents. Yakima County has one of the largest homeless populations in Washington, according to state point-in-time report. The gospel mission’s homeless shelters often serve more than 200 people per night. They serve far more than 100,000 free meals per year, run three thrift stores, health clinics, and also offer an addiction-recovery program.

The gospel mission does not require people to agree with its theology to receive services. They don’t need their clients to “validate our beliefs for us to live them out,” Johnson said, though they try to work in ways that bring people to Jesus.

But Johnson has argued that if the state continues to require his mission to hire people who don’t share their beliefs about sex and marriage, it would “literally destroy our ability to bring hope, joy, and life to the darkness, sorrow, and death on the streets.”

He told National Review, that it would make the mission “a lot less unique” and deprive “a bunch of folks that are really hurting and broken out on the street” from hearing the message that “God loves them and has a great plan for their life.”

Their ability to build a cohesive “do-over family” for their clients rests on their staffers “sharing an understanding of Christ,” Johnson said.

He called it “tyrannical” and “mind-blowing” that Washington courts and government leaders are picking apart religious organizations and essentially telling them which parts of their belief system are important and which should be supplanted by left-wing orthodoxy.

The issues in question, he said, are “deep theological matters” that have been “the subject of 2,000 years of internal dialogue within our religion.”

“To say, ‘changing this or that or the other thing about Christianity doesn’t change Christianity itself,’ maybe that is somebody’s opinion,” Johnson said, “but that is an internal matter for inside a religion that, if you’re not a part of, then you’re not going to understand.”

While the courts still determining exactly how far the ministerial exemption goes — pastor positions, teaching positions, and leadership positions with pastoral requirements are protected — courts have not extended it to positions behind the scenes, like IT professionals and administrative staff, said Ryan Tucker, and ADF lawyer.

The gospel mission has not been able to fill some of its open positions because of the WLAD requirements, Tucker said.

“These religious institutions are exposed if a particular position doesn’t meet the quote-unquote definition of ‘minister,’” he said. “It shouldn’t be that way. It’s insane to think we live in a world where religious institutions could be forced to hire people that disagree with them.”

The Yakima Union Gospel Mission’s hiring practices first drew attention in the summer of 2022, when someone posted a screenshot of their hiring questionnaire for a “thrift store associate” on Reddit. The job posting had been listed on the job-hunting site, Indeed.com.

The questionnaire asked potential job candidates about their beliefs about the “Trinity as it relates to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” about the Bible as “the unchanging truth for all people,” and if they believe what “the Bible says about homosexuality and how the Bible defines/views gender identity.”

The Reddit post went viral leading to a Newsweek article that called the questionnaire “strange,” and its inquiries “mystifying.”

Johnson said the Reddit post and the Newsweek article led to a flood of “violent voicemail threats” and “tons of hate applications, of people filling out the application and deliberately the questions in very inflammatory, aggressive ways.”

“Literally, someone left a voicemail saying, ‘I wouldn’t do anything to attack your guys’ building and facilities, but I know people who would, and I think you should change your policies,’” Johnson said. “It’s not just that we might have to hire somebody that would be not walking the path we’re walking in some important ways, but that it borders on physical risk. This makes some people really mad.”

Johnson said they’ve had to rely on word of mouth, rather than online job postings, to fill positions. “It’s taking us forever to fill spots,” he said.

Tucker said the WLAD restrictions don’t just involve hiring people. Even posting a religious hiring statement that includes its views on marriage and sex could put the gospel mission in legal jeopardy, he said.  Johnson “can’t even speak certain things without fear of retribution from state officials,” Tucker said.

The 2021 Washington Supreme Court ruling on WLAD came in a similar case involving Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission, which was sued for not considering a man in a same-sex relationship for a staff attorney job. A King County judge initially dismissed the lawsuit, but the Washington Supreme Court overturned that decision.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case in 2022, though justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas suggested that the Washington Supreme Court’s ruling may warrant a review in the future because its narrow interpretation of WLAD’s religious exemption may “have created a conflict with the Federal Constitution.”

In November 2022, in a similar case, Wyoming state and federal officials agreed to a settlement with ADF and the Wyoming Rescue Mission, acknowledging that the mission, as a religious organization, has the right to limit its hiring to people who share its beliefs. Government officials had accused the mission of discrimination for not hiring an open non-Christian who had applied to work at one of the mission’s thrift shops.

Johnson believes that his gospel mission should have the same right.

“I actually think Jesus is real. I actually really think that. And we all do,” he said of the gospel mission’s staff. “Jesus isn’t an idea to us, he’s a real person to us. And we’re really trying to let him tell us what to do and how to live so that we can then have something to offer to folks.”