232
Opinion of the Court
Applying this reasoning to New York City's Title I program, it is clear that Title I services are allocated on the basis of criteria that neither favor nor disfavor religion. 34 CFR § 200.10(b) (1996); see supra, at 209-210. The services are available to all children who meet the Act's eligibility requirements, no matter what their religious beliefs or where they go to school, 20 U. S. C. § 6312(c)(1)(F). The Board's program does not, therefore, give aid recipients any incentive to modify their religious beliefs or practices in order to obtain those services.
3
We turn now to Aguilar's conclusion that New York City's Title I program resulted in an excessive entanglement between church and state. Whether a government aid program results in such an entanglement has consistently been an aspect of our Establishment Clause analysis. We have considered entanglement both in the course of assessing whether an aid program has an impermissible effect of advancing religion, Walz v. Tax Comm'n of City of New York, 397 U. S. 664, 674 (1970), and as a factor separate and apart from "effect," Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S., at 612-613. Regardless of how we have characterized the issue, however, the factors we use to assess whether an entanglement is "excessive" are similar to the factors we use to examine "effect." That is, to assess entanglement, we have looked to "the character and purposes of the institutions that are benefited, the nature of the aid that the State provides, and the resulting relationship between the government and religious authority." Id., at 615. Similarly, we have assessed a law's "effect" by examining the character of the institutions benefited (e. g., whether the religious institutions were "predominantly religious"), see Meek, 421 U. S., at 363-364; cf. Hunt v. Mc-Nair, 413 U. S. 734, 743-744 (1973), and the nature of the aid that the State provided (e. g., whether it was neutral and nonideological), see Everson, supra, at 18; Wolman, 433
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