When a Christian worker told his employer that shaving his beard to comply with company policy violated his religious beliefs, Triple Canopy, a Virginia-based federal contractor, called his beard a “purely personal preference” and forced him to resign. In December 2023, the company was ordered to pay the former employee nearly $111,000 to settle a discrimination lawsuit.
In another recent case, a Muslim teen who worked at a Chipotle restaurant in Kansas alleged that her supervisor repeatedly asked her to remove her hijab and eventually partially removed it himself. In April 2025, the national chain was ordered to pay the former employee $20,000 to settle her religious harassment suit.
After years of decreases in workplace religious discrimination lawsuits, the trend has reversed in recent years, largely due to employees seeking religious exemptions from coronavirus vaccine mandates. In fiscal 2022, U.S. workers filed 13,814 religious discrimination charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a massive increase from 2,111 the previous year and the highest number filed since 2018.