Cite as: 530 U. S. 793 (2000)
Souter, J., dissenting
judgment); id., at 786-787 (Souter, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment), it is certainly not the only one. Everson made this clear from the start: secret aid to religion by the government is also barred. 330 U. S., at 16. State aid not attributed to the government would still violate a taxpayer's liberty of conscience, threaten to corrupt religion, and generate disputes over aid. In any event, since the same-terms feature of the scheme would, on the plurality's view, rule out the attribution or perception of endorsement, adopting the plurality's rule of facial evenhandedness would convert neutrality into a dispositive criterion of establishment constitutionality and eliminate the effects enquiry directed by Allen, Lemon, and other cases. Under the plural-ity's rule of neutrality, if a program met the first part of the Lemon enquiry, by declining to define a program's recipients by religion, it would automatically satisfy the second, in supposedly having no impermissible effect of aiding religion.19
Second, the plurality apparently assumes as a fact that equal amounts of aid to religious and nonreligious schools will have exclusively secular and equal effects, on both external perception and on incentives to attend different schools. See ante, at 809-810, 813-814. But there is no reason to believe that this will be the case; the effects of same-terms aid may not be confined to the secular sphere at all. This is the reason that we have long recognized that unrestricted aid to religious schools will support religious teaching in ad-19 Adopting the plurality's rule would permit practically any government aid to religion so long as it could be supplied on terms ostensibly comparable to the terms under which aid was provided to nonreligious recipients. As a principle of constitutional sufficiency, the manipulability of this rule is breathtaking. A legislature would merely need to state a secular objective in order to legalize massive aid to all religions, one religion, or even one sect, to which its largess could be directed through the easy exercise of crafting facially neutral terms under which to offer aid favoring that religious group. Short of formally replacing the Establishment Clause, a more dependable key to the public fisc or a cleaner break with prior law would be difficult to imagine.
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