Does the First Amendment permit a state to accommodate commercial participants while denying equivalent accommodations to religious participants?

I’m trying to understand the constitutional logic of an administrative system involving two anticipated categories of participants: commercial organizations and religious organizations.

Here is the sequence:

1. A state DOJ attorney issued a memorandum advising the Oregon Health Authority that it could not create reduced requirements or less restrictive regulatory standards for religious participants in Oregon’s psilocybin program. The memorandum reasoned that accommodations unavailable to secular participants would unlawfully advantage religion.

2. The proposed religious framework was then rejected.

3. The same DOJ attorney then immediately drafted an interagency agreement between OHA and the Higher Education Coordinating Commission. That agreement created an undisclosed, unpromulgated, and publicly funded administrative process to coordinate, accommodate, and expedite the approval of commercial psilocybin programs.

4. Religious training programs were not given access to that coordinated pathway. OHA instead required programs claiming statutory exemptions under ORS 345.015 to produce an additional exemption-determination document from HECC.

5. That document is not expressly required by statute, and HECC now states that it lacks both the authority and an administrative process to issue exemption determinations for the relevant exemption categories.

The resulting system appears to operate as follows:

\- Reducing burdens or creating tailored accommodations for religious participants is treated as an unconstitutional preference for religion.

\- Reducing burdens and creating an undisclosed, unpromulgated, publicly funded expedited pathway for commercial participants is treated as lawful administrative coordination.

\- Religious participants may be excluded from that coordinated process and subjected to an additional requirement that the other agency says it cannot satisfy.

I understand that the Establishment Clause may limit a state’s ability to confer benefits exclusively because an organization is religious. My question concerns the opposite disparity.

Does the First Amendment permit a state to create expedited procedures and reduced administrative burdens for commercial participants while denying comparable accommodations to religious participants and imposing an additional, potentially impossible requirement on the religious participants?

Would this be analyzed primarily under the Free Exercise Clause, the Establishment Clause, equal protection, administrative law, or some combination of those doctrines?

I’m particularly interested in whether the state may define “neutrality” as prohibiting accommodations that benefit religion while simultaneously creating affirmative accommodations that benefit commercial participants operating within the same administrative system.

DOJ Memorandum

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cCzeOG4KXqhvHrA6Dd4yC8kSosl0ub\\\_x/view?usp=drivesdk

Interagency Agreement

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1X9j2kdGBCJpYVs0ub6-8Byd44ZUfT2Tp/view?usp=drivesdk

Director Email

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12vrPRyPklTVCadt0ur\\\_ihfSuIk514C-j/view?usp=drivesdk