Cite as: 536 U. S. 639 (2002)
Souter, J., dissenting
and state separate has been lost. If the board resists, then the battle line between church and state will have been drawn . . . ." Id., at 256 (Douglas, J., dissenting). The scheme was sure to fuel strife among religions as well: "we can rest assured that a contest will be on to provide those books for religious schools which the dominant religious group concludes best reflect the theocentric or other philosophy of the particular church." Id., at 265.
Transcending even the sharp disagreement, however, was
"the consistency in the way the Justices went about deciding the case . . . . Neither side rested on any facile application of the 'test' or any simplistic reliance on the generality or evenhandedness of the state law. Disagreement concentrated on the true intent inferrable behind the law, the feasibility of distinguishing in fact between religious and secular teaching in church schools, and the reality or sham of lending books to pupils instead of supplying books to schools. . . . [T]he stress was on the practical significance of the actual benefits received by the schools." Mitchell, 530 U. S., at 876 (Souter, J., dissenting).
B
Allen recognized the reality that "religious schools pursue two goals, religious instruction and secular education," 392 U. S., at 245; if state aid could be restricted to serve the second, it might be permissible under the Establishment Clause. But in the retrenchment that followed, the Court saw that the two educational functions were so intertwined in religious primary and secondary schools that aid to secular education could not readily be segregated, and the intrusive monitoring required to enforce the line itself raised Establishment Clause concerns about the entanglement of church and state. See Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602, 620 (1971) (striking down program supplementing salaries for teachers of secular subjects in private schools). To avoid
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