Agostini Squeezes the Lemon-test

Notice that Agostini has merged the 2d and 3rd prongs of the Lemon-test, so that the entanglement prong is now only a factor in determining whather a law has the primary effect of advancing or inhibiting religion. This point is made (not very clearly) on p. 1757 of your casebook. It is made more clearly in Mitchell (at p. 1759 referring to Agostini's "purpose and effect test") and in Zelman (p. 1766).

Here is a fuller presentation of what the Court said in Agostini:

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. McNair, 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, 330 U.S., at 18 ; Wolman, 433 U.S., at 244 . Indeed, in Lemon itself, the entanglement that the Court found "independently" to necessitate the program's invalidation also was found to have the effectof inhibiting religion. See, e.g., 403 U.S., at 620 ("[W]e cannot ignore here the danger that pervasive modern governmental power will ultimately intrude on religion . . ."). Thus, it is simplest to recognize why entanglement is significant and treat it--as we did in Walz--as an aspect of the inquiry into a statute's effect.