Christian teacher gets jury trial in name, pronoun case: Employment & Labor Insider

John Kluge, a high school orchestra teacher in the Indianapolis area, was let go in 2018 after he refused to address transgender students by their preferred names and pronouns.

Mr. Kluge, a Christian (my guess is nondenominational, but no further details about his beliefs are provided), believes that sex is binary and unchangeable, and that it would be a sin to address transgender students in a way that is inconsistent with their biological sex. I’ve written about his case here and here.

The “preferred name” policy and Mr. Kluge’s objections

The school adopted a policy in 2017 to require teachers to address transgender students by names that the students listed in an online directory with the approval of their parents and medical providers.

The directory included preferred names for some transgender students, at least one of whom was in the orchestra. Mr. Kluge was told to comply with the policy or else. He suggested that he address all of his students – transgender and “cis” – by their last names only, “like a coach.”

The school agreed to this compromise for the 2017-18 school year, but there were complaints that the transgender students were uncomfortable and believed that the students all knew exactly why Mr. Kluge was now referring to everybody by last name only. (Mr. Kluge presented evidence to the contrary.) There were also some allegations, denied by Mr. Kluge, that he continued to address “cis” students by first names and sex-specific honorifics like “Miss,” and would not engage with transgender students.

As a result of the negative feedback, the administration told him that he couldn’t have the “last-name accommodation” in the 2018-19 school year. Mr. Kluge was prompted to submit what he thought was a conditional letter of resignation, and in an award ceremony at the end of the 2017-18 school year, he called his students up to the stage by their preferred names. Afterward, he tried to rescind his conditional letter of resignation, but the school “accepted” it, meaning that his services were no longer required.

Mr. Kluge then sued the school system under Title VII, claiming that the school failed to accommodate his religious beliefs and retaliated against him for seeking accommodation. He lost his case and lost on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Both courts found, among other things, that it would have been an undue hardship for the school to accommodate his beliefs. At the time, an “undue hardship” existed if the religious accommodation would create for the employer more than a de minimis difficulty. In English, that means a minor inconvenience.

And then came Groff

In the summer of 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Groff v. DeJoy. In Groff, the Court ruled that “undue hardship” meant that the accommodation had to “result in substantial increased costs; in relation to the conduct of the particular business.”

As a result of Groff, the Seventh Circuit vacated its opinion in the Kluge case and sent it back down to the District Court, which (again) found in favor of the school system. Mr. Kluge appealed (again).

Which brings us to this past Tuesday, August 5, 2025. On Tuesday, the majority on the same Seventh Circuit panel that previously ruled against Mr. Kluge found in his favor on his failure-to-accommodate claim, meaning that his accommodation claim will go to a jury. (He lost again on his retaliation claim.)

Good-faith honest belief? Maybe not in accommodation cases.

The most interesting part of this week’s decision, in my opinion, is the discussion of the “good-faith honest belief” principle as it applies to reasonable accommodation cases.

I’ve written about good-faith belief before. Generally, it works like this. Let’s say David sues you under Title VII, saying you fired him because he is a Methodist. In fact, you fired David because an internal investigation indicated that he was embezzling from the company. The only problem is, after David was fired, you found out that the real embezzler was not David but David’s co-worker, who is Episcopalian.

Under the “good-faith belief” rule, you should still win in court as long as you honestly believed that David was the embezzler and that your belief was at least somewhat reasonable at the time that you fired him. That’s because if you fired him because you honestly believed he was embezzling, then you didn’t fire him because of his religion.

Crazy, but it makes sense, doesn’t it?

Well, the Brownsburg, Indiana, Community School Corporation tried to make a similar argument. The school system said when it tried to accommodate Mr. Kluge in 2017-18, the accommodation was disruptive to the school’s mission of creating a safe and welcoming environment for students. And could get the school in trouble under Title IX. And they had some evidence to support that.

But Mr. Kluge had evidence to the contrary. And besides, how traumatic is it to have your orchestra teacher refer to all students by their last names? (Assuming that’s what Mr. Kluge did?)

So, the school fell back on, “Well, even if we were wrong and even if this accommodation didn’t interfere with the good order of the school, we’re entitled to the good-faith belief defense. Because we honestly believed that the accommodation was disruptive based on the feedback we received.”

And now here’s the interesting part. The court said that the good-faith belief defense doesn’t generally apply in failure-to-accommodate cases. It works with a straight discrimination case. You fired David because you thought he was embezzling. That means you didn’t fire him for being a Methodist, even if you were wrong about the embezzlement.

But when an employer refuses to accommodate an employee’s religious beliefs (and I assume the same principle would apply to disability accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act), the employer can’t win just by showing that it meant well. Instead, the employer has to have some solid evidence that making the accommodation really would have been an undue hardship. Undue hardship as defined in Groff. And at the summary judgment stage (where this case has been for several years), that evidence of hardship would have to be undisputed.

Another interesting point: The school argued that Mr. Kluge’s religious beliefs were not “sincerely held” because he used students’ preferred names at the awards ceremony. Mr. Kluge explained he did not think it would be appropriate to address students by their last names in that setting. He also acknowledged that he had sinned by using preferred names. The panel majority said that a jury would have to decide whether Mr. Kluge’s religious beliefs were sincere. If a jury finds that Mr. Kluge’s beliefs were not sincere, he loses the case because the school system would have had no duty to accommodate. At all.

And, in case you’re keeping score . . .

The judges on the panel for both Seventh Circuit cases were Ilana Rovner (who wrote the 2023 opinion and dissented this week on the accommodation issue), Michael Brennan (who wrote this week’s opinion), and Amy St. Eve. Judge Rovner is a George H.W. Bush appointee, and Judges Brennan and St. Eve are Trump appointees. The District Court decisions were issued by Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson, an Obama appointee.