Cite as: 530 U. S. 793 (2000)
Souter, J., dissenting
616); Wolman, supra, at 242 (quoting Lemon, supra, at 616 (describing permitted services aid as "secular, neutral, or nonideological")).
The shift from equipoise to secular was not, however, our last redefinition, for the Court again transformed the sense of "neutrality" in the 1980's. Reexamining and reinterpreting Everson and Allen, we began to use the word "neutral" to mean "evenhanded," in the sense of allocating aid on some common basis to religious and secular recipients. Again, neither Everson nor Allen explicitly used "neutral" in this manner, but just as the label for equipoise had lent itself to referring to the secular characteristic of what a government might provide, it was readily adaptable to referring to the generality of government services, as in Everson's paradigms, to which permissible benefits were compared.
The increased attention to a notion of evenhanded distribution was evident in Nyquist, where the Court distinguished the program under consideration from the government services approved in Allen and Everson, in part because "the class of beneficiaries [in Everson and Allen] included all schoolchildren, those in public as well as those in private schools." 413 U. S., at 782, n. 38. Nyquist then reserved the question whether "some form of public assistance . . . made available generally without regard to the sectarian-nonsectarian, or public-nonpublic nature of the institution benefitted" would be permissible. Id., at 783, n. 38 (citations omitted). Subsequent cases continued the focus on the "generality" of the approved government services as an important characteristic. Meek, for example, characterized Everson and Allen as approving "a general program" to pay bus fares and to lend school books, respectively, 421 U. S., at 360; id., at 360, n. 8 (approving two similar "general program[s]" in New York and Pennsylvania), and Wolman upheld diagnostic services described as " 'general welfare services for children,' " 433 U. S., at 243 (quoting Meek, supra, at 371, n. 21).
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