Handling Religious Accommodation Requests A Cautionary Tale for West Virginia Employers By J. TYLER MAYHEW, ESQ., Partner, Bowles Rice One of the most fundamental rights enjoyed by every American is freedom of religion. Enshrined in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, all Americans are guaranteed the individual right to freely practice their religious beliefs without interference from the government. This right is so important to our society that, through Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress extended certain religious protections in the workplace by prohibiting employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of religion. As part of prohibiting religious discrimination, Title VII requires employers to reasonably accommodate an employee’s sincerely held religious beliefs, practices or observances unless doing so would cause an undue hardship. For many decades, however, an employee’s right to a religious accommodation at work was severely limited by how the courts interpreted Title VII’s “undue hardship” exception. Unlike in the context of disability-related accommodations, historically, employers only needed to demonstrate a “de minimis cost,” meaning a very minor financial expense or slight operational burden, to prove an undue hardship and thereby deny a religious accommodation request. This changed in 2023. In Groff v. DeJoy, the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled that employers must grant a requested religious accommodation unless they can show that doing so would result in “substantial” increased cost or burden on the operation of their business. In other words, to prove “undue hardship” and deny a religious accommodation request post-Groff, an employer must now show that the burden of granting the request rises to an “excessive” or “unjustifiable” level. Before reaching the question of undue burden, however, an employee must first request an accommodation and establish that the accommodation relates to a belief that is both “sincerely held” and “religious in nature.” On Aug. 31, 2026, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal appeals court covering West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, provided a cautionary tale on how such requests should be viewed and handled under today’s legal landscape. Wilkins-Bailey v. Essity Professional Hygiene North America, LLC is a case about mandatory vaccination policies in the workplace. Such policies became commonplace during the COVID-19 pandemic once effective vaccines became available to the public in 2021. And those workplace policies generated considerable controversy on political and, at times, religious grounds. In Wilkins-Bailey, the employee sought a religious-based exemption from her employer’s mandatory vaccination policy, articulating various religious 12 WEST VIRGINIA BANKER
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