Yes, in most cases a religious exemption requires approval after a formal review regardless of the reason or its merits.

Please provide some evidence for your claim. There are plenty of cases out there to show the opposite of what you claim.

https://wp.nyu.edu/compliance_enforcement/2026/01/21/ninth-c...

You could answer that yourself. To qualify this first ask what are the criteria for a person to establish a valid religious exemption request and then what are the criteria for a regulating body or employer to deny the exemption according to that criteria.

Here is a brief example from the American Bar Association: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/resources/human-righ...

Also, some institutions have much wider latitude to deny a variety of religious exemption requests than other due to environmental hazards and safety concerns.

This is the opposite of what your prior comment said. Your prior comment says that exemption requests require approval regardless of the merits.