WASHINGTON — In October 2025, the U.S. Senate confirmed Brittany Panuccio as a member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), restoring the agency’s quorum and giving commissioners aligned with the Trump administration a working majority.
Panuccio’s appointment enables the EEOC to act on stalled priorities and reconsider guidance and enforcement positions adopted in recent years.
Last week, some of the implications of that change came into sharper relief.
A federal district court finalized a partial settlement between the EEOC and the Christian Employers Alliance (CEA), represented by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF)- an American legal advocacy and interest group that is explicitly Christian and widely recognized as conservative – resolving part of a lawsuit over the application of federal employment discrimination law to employers with religious objections to policies concerning gender identity.
EEOC Seal [public domain
Created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the EEOC enforces federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, and genetic information. Under current Supreme Court precedent, Title VII’s prohibition against discrimination because of sex encompasses sexual orientation and transgender status. The agency investigates allegations of discrimination, seeks resolution through mediation or conciliation, and can litigate cases in federal court. It also provides employers and employees with guidance and technical assistance and enforces protections against retaliation.
The CEA lawsuit, filed in January 2025, challenged Biden administration interpretations of Title VII concerning gender identity and transgender employees. ADF argued that those policies unlawfully required religious employers to comply with workplace practices that conflicted with their beliefs, including the use of employees’ preferred pronouns and policies concerning dress codes and access to sex-specific facilities.
Under the partial settlement, the EEOC agreed not to pursue enforcement against current or future CEA members over certain workplace policies concerning pronouns, dress codes, and access to bathrooms based on gender identity. ADF Senior Counsel Matt Bowman praised the agreement as protecting the ability of religious employers to conduct their businesses according to their faith and maintain single-sex facilities.
The outcome, however, is narrower than a judicial determination that religious employers generally possess a constitutional right to disregard federal protections concerning transgender employees.
The EEOC and CEA reached an agreement affecting present and future CEA members, after which the court dismissed that portion of the litigation. ADF itself describes the resolution as a “partial settlement.” The court therefore did not establish a generally applicable constitutional rule governing all religious employers.
Another portion of Christian Employers Alliance v. EEOC remains unresolved. CEA also challenged EEOC rules implementing pregnancy accommodations, arguing that the agency improperly interpreted federal law to require employer accommodations related to elective abortion and could treat some anti-abortion expression as workplace harassment. That portion of the litigation remains pending but is currently on hold.
The timing of the settlement also appears to be significant. CEA filed its lawsuit on January 15, 2025, challenging positions taken by the EEOC during the Biden administration. Since the change in administrations, the agency has changed direction on several issues involving gender identity and transgender discrimination.
The settlement therefore raises a broader question about religious liberty: How broadly will the federal government interpret protections for religious employers, and will it administer those protections neutrally among religious traditions?
The legal framework itself is not limited to Christianity. Federal protections for religious exercise extend across religious traditions, and previous federal regulations discussing religious-employer protections have contemplated organizations and businesses associated with religions other than Christianity.
Federal law also protects the religious rights of employees.
Following the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Groff v. DeJoy, an employer seeking to deny an employee’s religious accommodation must demonstrate that the accommodation would impose an undue hardship involving “substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business.”
The EEOC is explicit about the breadth of those protections. Its public guidance states: “The laws enforced by EEOC protect all sincerely-held religious beliefs.”
The agency’s guidance explains that employers may not treat employees less favorably because of their religion, that employees may seek reasonable religious accommodations, and that workers are protected from religious harassment and retaliation. Significantly for minority religious communities, the EEOC specifically and explicitly identifies Wicca among the nontraditional religious beliefs protected under federal employment law.
That produces an important distinction, and an important test of the government’s commitment to religious neutrality. The EEOC guidance primarily addresses the religious rights of employees, while the CEA litigation concerns religious objections asserted by employers when compliance with employment law conflicts with their beliefs.
It also leaves an open question: If the EEOC affords members of a Christian employers’ organization particular consideration when sincerely held religious beliefs conflict with its enforcement policies, would it afford comparable consideration to an employer asserting sincerely held religious beliefs rooted in Wicca or another minority faith?
Southern Baptists Press DOJ on Religious Liberty
A separate development last week raises similar questions about the direction of federal religious-liberty policy.
On August 19, Evan Lenow, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote to Attorney General Todd Blanche commending the Department of Justice’s newly updated religious-liberty guidelines.
The ERLC specifically praised protections concerning “the rights of religious organizations, employees, and employers,” along with provisions involving enforcement of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, parental rights, religious conduct, and free speech.
“The state must respect collective and individual religious convictions,” Lenow wrote, arguing that Americans should be able to practice their beliefs publicly and in the workplace without government discrimination or retaliation.
Those principles are religiously neutral on their face. The remainder of the letter, however, places them within an explicitly Southern Baptist theological and policy framework.
Lenow writes that religious liberty allows Southern Baptists to fulfill Christ’s command to “make disciples of all nations.” The ERLC then identifies several priorities for the Justice Department.
First, it urges DOJ to continue implementing its new religious-liberty guidelines, including protections for religious organizations, employers, and employees and vigorous enforcement of RFRA.
Second, the ERLC asks the department to reverse an Office of Legal Counsel interpretation of the Comstock Act concerning the mailing of abortion medication. It also seeks DOJ involvement in Louisiana v. FDA and, at minimum, restrictions on abortion medication distributed through the mail.
Third, the organization asks DOJ to prioritize opposition to what the ERLC calls “radical gender ideology.” It specifically encourages federal involvement in litigation involving parents and teachers who contend that public-school policies concerning transgender minors violate their religious rights.
The letter ultimately places these policy requests within an explicitly theological understanding of government and society. “People must be rightly aligned with God and his design,” Lenow writes, before describing religious liberty as enabling Southern Baptists to defend what they understand as the sanctity of human life, biblical teachings concerning gender and sexuality, and their responsibility to evangelize.
There is nothing unusual about a religious organization advocating for public policies that are informed by its theological convictions. Religious organizations across the ideological and theological spectrum regularly petition government officials, participate in litigation, and advocate before Congress and federal agencies. Their ability to do so is itself an exercise of religious liberty and free speech.
The relevant question is what happens when government responds.
The ERLC letter and the CEA settlement are legally separate developments. There is no evidence that the ERLC letter influenced the EEOC settlement, nor does either development establish coordination between the organizations involved. Together, however, they highlight an increasingly important question about the federal government’s emerging approach to religious liberty.
If religious liberty means that government must respect “collective and individual religious convictions,” as the ERLC argues, that principle necessarily extends beyond Christianity.
Would a Witch, Pagan, Heathen, polytheist, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, or practitioner of an Indigenous religious tradition, or any other minority-faith individual or organization receive comparable consideration when its religious convictions conflict with federal policy?
The question is particularly relevant when federal agencies themselves insist that religious protections are not denominational. The EEOC expressly recognizes Wicca as protected under federal employment law. The Constitution likewise does not establish one religious tradition as the source or preferred beneficiary of religious liberty.
The developments of the past week therefore do not, by themselves, establish that federal religious-liberty policy has become Christian policy. They do provide reason to examine whether a formally religion-neutral framework is being implemented with equal solicitude for majority and minority faiths.
That distinction may become increasingly important as religious organizations press the administration to translate their theological priorities into federal policy. The test of a government’s commitment to religious liberty is not simply whether it protects religious beliefs with which those in power agree, but whether the same principles remain available when the religious claimant comes from outside the dominant religious tradition.
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