Supreme Court finds for evangelical Christian who refused to work on Sundays

Among the cases the Supreme Court announced on Thursday was Groff v. DeJoy, in which U.S. Post Office auxiliary mailman Gerald Groff argued he couldn't work on Sundays due to his religious faith. An auxiliary mailman is one that pitches in on holidays and weekends when other permanent employees are out.

The justices decided how far employers must go to accommodate employees' religious practices. The federal law holds that they can't discriminate against someone unless their religious practice can't "reasonably" be accommodated without "undue hardship."

Groff's lawyers cited Title VII of the Civil Rights Act which specifically cites "religion" as a protected

Trans World Airlines v. Hardison, a previous 1977 ruling, defined "undue hardship" as anything that could require minimal costs. In this day and age, computers generally make up schedules for those working on shifts, and the theory is that it wasn't a hardship for the USPS to accommodate the worker to make his availability only on Saturdays and non-Christian holidays.

"His case will now return to lower courts for further litigation," NBC News explained.

In the future, courts "should resolve whether a hardship would be substantial in the context of an employer's business in the commonsense manner that it would use in applying any such test," Justice Samuel Alito wrote.

Cato Institute election lawyer Walter Olson summed up Justice Sonia Sotomayor by explaining, "Congress has consistently passed up the chance to adopt a standard more burdensome to employers, even though it has not hesitated to revisit and correct many other high court decisions on Title VII that it saw as mistaken."

Olson also said, "If a workplace divided by differential treatment based on religion or any other identity is a less efficient and unified workplace, it will often be legitimate for employers to say no to that differential treatment."

The argument from the non-conservative judges is that it's a slippery slope to preferential treatment to workers of faith over those without.

Read the full report from NBC here.