Will McRaney is taking one last stab at suing the Southern Baptist Convention North American Mission Board after a legal setback last fall.
McRaney, who was fired as executive director of the Baptist Convention of Maryland and Delaware in 2015 allegedly at the behest of NAMB’s president, has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari. That is a formal request to a higher court, asking it to review a decision from a lower court.
If four or more Supreme Court justices vote to hear the case, the writ is granted, and the case proceeds; if not, it’s denied. Such a petition argues why the lower court’s decision was wrong and why the Supreme Court should intervene.
Joined by his wife, Sandy, Will McRaney updates progress on his lawsuit against the SBC North American Mission Board on Facebook live in 2019.
In McRaney’s case, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the “church autonomy doctrine” — also known as the ecclesial abstention doctrine — precludes the court from considering whether McRaney was wrongfully terminated by outside influence from NAMB.
His filing characterizes the lower court ruling as saying the ecclesial abstention doctrine “provides a defendant immunity from claims by a plaintiff who never worked for the defendant, never served as a minister for the defendant and never submitted to the authority of the defendant with respect to any ecclesiastical or secular matter.”
Therefore, McRaney says, the question to the Supreme Court is this: “Does the church autonomy doctrine apply to, and foreclose, civil law claims which are not disputes about the internal affairs or self-governance of a religious institution?”
McRaney has contended all along that his case carries enormous consequences for other religious bodies and their employees.
At the Fifth Circuit, two of the three judges reviewing his case said the non-hierarchical structure of Baptist churches has no bearing on whether the court can accept McRaney’s case. The very nature of an employment dispute within a religious context triggers the abstention doctrine, they said.
McRaney and his attorney, Scott Gant, vehemently disagree. If the president of a mission board can threaten to withhold funding from an autonomous organization for not heeding his request on firing an employee, no employee at any such institution is safe, they say.
The Supreme Court traditionally accepts only a small number of such requests for review.
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