Female pastor regains right to sue church

SEATTLE – A federal appeals court drew a fine line between church and state Friday, ruling that a female pastor can sue her church for sexual harassment without violating the church’s right to govern itself.

The decision by the three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which included a sharp dissent, means Monica L. McDowell Elvig can pursue her claim against the Rev. Will Ackles and Calvin Presbyterian Church in Shoreline. Nevertheless, the court severely limited the amount of compensation she can seek.

The judges returned the case to federal court in Seattle, where a judge had previously dismissed it.

Elvig joined Calvin Presbyterian as an associate pastor in December 2000. She claimed Ackles began harassing her shortly thereafter, that he intimidated her and created a hostile work environment. When she complained about the treatment, she said, she was relieved of some duties, verbally harassed and, a year after she started, was fired.

The church then barred her from seeking employment in any other Presbyterian church, she said.

Calvin Presbyterian, which held an inquiry into the harassment allegations and determined Elvig’s claims were unsubstantiated, argued that her lawsuit violated the church’s First Amendment rights. The U.S. Supreme Court has previously held that the government must not meddle in church personnel decisions, the appellate judges noted.

Judge Raymond Fisher wrote for the 2-1 majority that the church’s autonomy does not relieve it of its responsibility to protect employees from sexual harassment.

Because the church has the right to hire and fire people as it pleases, he said, Elvig cannot pursue a claim that the church retaliated against her by firing her, and that she is thus due lost wages. But she can pursue a claim that the harassment itself – and any verbal abuse she suffered from the pastor in retaliation for reporting him – caused her distress.

The church might well be able to win the case by proving it acted with reasonable care to change any hostile environment that existed, he wrote.

But in his dissent, Judge Stephen S. Trott wrote that to allow a jury to review the church’s internal inquiry procedures would be an unconstitutional abridgment of the church’s rights.

“A secular federal court jury has been given the authority to invade, to evaluate and to overrule the Presbyterian Church’s final judgment,” Trott wrote. “Such an inquiry into whether the church exercised ‘reasonable care’ will involve, by necessity, penetrating discovery and microscopic examination by litigation of the church’s disciplinary procedures and subsequent responsive decisions.”