[Larry Lucido]

I think they were wrong in firing him -- grounds of religion, race, color, etc.

There are clearly carved-out exceptions to that, Salvation. Your parish is free to hire Catholics only. A Presbyterian church is free to hire only Presbyterians. Any other outcome would be absurd.

[Dionysiusdecordealcis]

No, that's not correct. If they had said that you have to belong to a specified set of denominations, you would be right. It is true that a Catholic parish can specify that only Catholics can be hired and a Presbyterian denomination can specify only Presbyterians. Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries in Elkhart, Indiana, used to insist that even Baptists be willing to join the Mennonites as a condition of employment--they may have changed that by now. North Park University has a requirement that its president either be Evangelical Covenant or willing to become one. This is perfectly legal and fine by me. But that's not what Wheaton did.

Wheaton does not specify denominations. It can't--it's an endless task because their constituency is so varied and some of Wheaton's constituents (Plymouth Brethren) would be offended by specifying denominations at all--it would exclude them. So Wheaton chose the route of using a doctrinal statement instead of church membership as the criterion. But Evangelicals disagree about so many aspects of doctrine that the statement had to be left vague.

Now, in practice, they have added as a gloss to their doctrinal statement a negative-denominational criterion: one may not be a Catholic even if one can sign the doctrinal statement in good conscience. Most of their constituency will think this negative-denominational criterion reasonable and that's why they added it. But I doubt that it was spelled out contractually--perhaps there was a clause like that in contract boilerplate.