The Ministerial Exception’s Unrealized Promise of Early and Straightforward Resolution of Church Autonomy Matters

The ministerial exception in employment cases is a subpart of the church autonomy doctrine. The Supreme Court has also found discrete domains of autonomy when churches are sued over qualifications for church membership and excommunication, the election of polity by a religious organization, and other disputes that involve courts taking sides in religious issues. Churches are immune from claims falling into these discrete subject matters or zones because such claims are structurally barred as a matter of church-state separation under the First Amendment.

Two recent cases in the Southern District of New York addressed disputes between ministers and their churches. In Turman v. Abyssinian Baptist Church, the court reached the right result, but by an overly circuitous path. In Belya v. Kapral, the district court failed to apply the ministerial exception, and the Second Circuit failed to correct that mistake, leading to years of litigation in a lawsuit that should have been dismissed early given no dispute over plaintiff being a minister.

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The Rev. Eboni Marshall Turman, currently an associate professor at Yale Divinity School, was an unsuccessful applicant to fill the position of senior pastor at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, a historic black church in Harlem. Turman was first licensed to preach at the church in 2005, ordained there in 2007, and served in various leadership positions at the church between 2003 and 2012. She applied to be the senior pastor, but in 2023, the vacancy was filled by a male applicant.

Turman sued both the church and Valerie S. Grant, chair of the search committee, in the Southern District of New York alleging sex discrimination in violation of the New York state and municipal human rights acts. She also alleged breach of contract, citing the church’s by-laws and the job posting stating that the position was open to candidates without regard to sex. On March 31, 2025, Judge Dale E. Ho granted the church’s motion to dismiss relying in part on the First Amendment’s church autonomy doctrine.

Alexander Belya was a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, serving in a congregation outside Miami, Florida. In late 2018, word came from Moscow to the wider church that Belya had been promoted to Bishop of Miami. This came as a surprise to senior clergy in the eastern U.S. because there had been no election, a step necessary for elevation to bishop. These clergy sent a jointly signed letter to the executive committee of the leadership council in Moscow known as the Synod. The letter advised that there had been no election, and it questioned the veracity of earlier communications apparently stating Belya’s eligibility to serve as a bishop. When the letter to the Synod was leaked to the public and picked up by the religious press, Belya’s reputation was harmed because people speculated that the documents supporting his election were forged.

In 2020, in the Southern District of New York, Belya sued those who had signed the letter, alleging defamation, and named as additional parties the Eastern American Diocese and the Synod. Defendants timely moved to dismiss Belya’s complaint citing the church autonomy doctrine. The motion had obvious merit given the Supreme Court’s rulings in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC and Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, holding that the employment and promotion of a church’s ministers is one of the domains wholly within the internal governance of a church. Nonetheless, Judge Victor Marrero denied the motion because he believed that reliance on “neutral principles of law” permitted the plaintiff to sidestep the First Amendment’s ministerial exception.

Defendants sought an interlocutory appeal under the collateral order doctrine. The Second Circuit denied the appeal, and a petition for reconsideration en banc was denied by an evenly divided vote of 6 to 6. Judge Michael H. Park dissented from the en banc denial, arguing that the trial judge should have dismissed because the “neutral principles” approach is limited to intrachurch property disputes and cannot be used to sidestep the ministerial exception. “Neutral principles” has never been applied by the Supreme Court in an employment dispute between a church and its minister. Indeed, there is not a hint of the “neutral principles” workaround of church autonomy in Hosanna-Tabor or Our Lady.

On remand, Belya’s case was reassigned to Judge Arun Subramanian. After completion of discovery, on March 31, 2025, the district court granted summary judgment in favor of the defendants relying in part on church autonomy. The court found that if the case were to go to trial, it would be impossible to avoid multiple religious questions; hence, resort to “neutral principles” was futile.

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In Turman, the district court got the right result. But the court need only have identified the case as one about the hiring or promotion of a cleric, citing Hosanna-Tabor and Our Lady. Case dismissed. No further analysis required. Instead, it labored to identify how the court would inevitably become entangled in religious questions or be forced to take sides in religious disputes. To be sure, judicial entanglement with religion is an additional domain of forbidden interference with the internal governance of a church. But the most straightforward approach to the question in Turman would have been to find that the dispute centered on the selection of a cleric, then dismiss the case for that reason alone. Instead, the court made hard work of an easy case.

Notably, the Turman court rightly had no trouble dismissing the breach of contract claim that accompanied the sex discrimination claim. The two causes of action arose out of a common set of operative facts. Accordingly, if the church autonomy defense shields the church by barring the discrimination claim, it necessarily shields the church from all factually similar claims. It is not the name of the writ that matters, be it “employment discrimination” or “breach of contract.” What matters is that there is a common core of operative facts for the two causes of action.

The court also rightly dismissed the same claims against Grant, chair of the search committee. It makes no difference that Grant is a person, not a church. In all relevant respects, Grant acted as an agent on behalf of Abyssinian Baptist. So she enjoyed the same immunity as the church.

Still, though the court came to the right disposition, it did not demonstrate a clear understanding of the theory of church autonomy. Judge Ho made a passing remark about church autonomy not being categorical. But it is. Where church autonomy applies, it applies categorically because it is structural, not a personal right. The plaintiff argued that the ministerial exception defense had been waived. But as the Third, Fifth, and Sixth Circuits have ruled, church autonomy is a matter of constitutional structure—not constitutional rights—and structure can never be waived. The Turman court’s lengthy struggle over the question of waiver was wasted time.

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Back in 2020 in Belya v. Kapral, the district court’s turn to “neutral principles” was wrong. In a dispute between a church and a minister, the ministerial exception applies and the First Amendment cannot be circumvented. On remand, Belya was assigned to a different district court judge, and discovery was completed. Summary judgment was granted, but as with Turman, it was for the wrong reason—bringing in entanglement with doctrine rather than stopping with the clearly applicable ministerial exception. That said, the trial judge’s hands were tied by the view of the case in an evenly divided Second Circuit.

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One promise of Hosanna-Tabor and Our Lady—besides an accurate application of First Amendment principles in the context of church autonomy—was quick and inexpensive resolution of church autonomy cases. Given the confusion in Turman and Belya, that promise is not being realized. The Supreme Court may have to grant certiorari in another case before the question of nonintervention in matters of internal church governance is put to rest.