The Rev. Derrick Gomez alleges that in his job with the North Carolina Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America he was subjected to an intolerable pattern of racial discrimination that ultimately led him to resign.

It's not clear whether the allegations -- contained in a lawsuit in federal court -- have merit. And it may not matter.

The suit may never be heard because of a First Amendment exemption that protects the church from government interference in matters of hiring or firing. Last month, U.S. Magistrate Judge Wallace Dixon of Durham recommended that the suit be dismissed -- not because the allegations are untrue, but because religious employers are shielded from employee lawsuits by the so-called ministerial exception.

A judge is expected to rule on the case in the next few months.

According to the suit, Gomez, who worked as mission director at the synod's Salisbury headquarters, endured three years of shunning and hostility before he resigned. The suit says he was excluded from meetings and staff retreats, denied office space, forced to take calls in a supply closet and called racial epithets. As he submitted his resignation, the suit alleges, the former assistant to the bishop called Gomez by a racial slur.

The church, which has denied wrongdoing, moved for the dismissal citing a long list of precedents that protect churches from having to delve into hiring preferences.

"Because of the church autonomy and ministerial exception principles, Defendants do not need to offer any justification with respect to these allegations," wrote lawyers for the church.

Gomez, who has served as an ordained minister within the 4.8 million member denomination for more than 25 years, thinks that's unfair.

"I don't believe any organization should have unfettered power to discriminate and claim ministerial exception to avoid public moral scrutiny," the 58-year-old minister said.

Boundaries are firm

In cases going back more than 100 years, judges have applied the ministerial exception to a host of employee lawsuits, giving religious organizations the autonomy to manage their affairs according to their beliefs without government interference.

The constitutional protection does not give religious institutions immunity from the law in general -- particularly criminal laws, such as those being pursued against members of a polygamist sect in Texas. But it does grant churches immunity when it comes to employment decisions, such as selecting clergy, deciding what tasks to assign employees and when to fire them.

It's this principle that allows Roman Catholics to exclude women as priests, or Southern Baptists to prevent women from leading churches -- in contrast to businesses, which would face discrimination charges for the same kinds of actions.

And the exclusion is far-reaching. A former Roman Catholic nun alleged she was forced to resign as a Catholic college chaplain after helping expose a priest's alleged misconduct, but courts dismissed her suit. A woman training to become a nun claimed she was forced out by the order after she got a breast cancer diagnosis; her suit, too, was dismissed. And in cases where faculty at religiously affiliated colleges wanted to form a union, courts moved to exempt those schools from the nation's collective bargaining laws.

"The bottom line is that a church has absolute authority in deciding whom it will have as its ministers," said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has written on the subject. "Any kind of secular second-guessing would be an unacceptable interference with the free exercise of religion."

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