Evangelical Catholicism is thus both culture-forming and counter-cultural. It is culture-forming, in that it takes the formation, nurturance, and maturation of a distinctive culture–the Church–with utmost seriousness. And it does not look to the ambient public culture for suggestions as to how this distinctive ecclesial culture, this distinctive mode of life called "Christian," is to be structured and lived. Thus it is no accident, as the Marxists used to say, that the emergence of Evangelical Catholicism has been concurrent with the liberation of the Catholic Church from the Babylonian captivity of ecclesial establishment, with its evangelically unbecoming nexus between the power of the state (however that state might be organised politically) and the life of the Church. This liberation has been a fruit of the Second Vatican Council and its Declaration on Religious Freedom (Dignitatis Humanae); it has been codified in ecclesiastical law by Canon 377, which bars governments from any direct role in the nomination of bishops. Evangelical Catholicism is, then, post-Constantinian Catholicism. It does not seek the favour of the state. Rather, it asks of the state, and if necessary it demands of the state, the free space in which to be itself: a community of Eucharistic worship, evangelical proclamation, and charity. And it does so in order to ask the state (and society, and culture, and economics) to consider the possibility of their redemption.

This last suggests at least one facet of Evangelical Catholicism's counter-cultural character. This side of the Kingdom of God, the Church will always be challenging the principalities and powers (be they political, social, economic or cultural) to admit that the things done by states, societies, cultures, and economies stand under the judgment of moral norms that do not emerge from within those states, societies, cultures and economies. Rather, the moral norms applicable to constructing and sustaining states, societies, cultures and economies that foster the conditions for the possibility of genuine human flourishing are transcendent; they reflect the inalienable dignity and value of the human person — a dignity and value that is inherent, not conferred. Those moral norms stand in judgment on us; we do not construct them or tailor them to our own requirements.

At a moment in the cultural history of the West when utilitarianism is the default moral position in public life, Evangelical Catholicism insists that "Will it work?" is not the only question. "Is it right?" is the prior question, and the answer to that question, Pontius Pilate and the Guardian notwithstanding, can be known by the arts of reason, properly deployed.

Evangelical Catholicism, in the line of development that runs from Leo XIII through Benedict XVI, thus takes a rather different stance toward public life than the Catholicism of Christendom (whose conception of Church and State — or, more broadly, Church and Society — long outlasted the 16th-century fracturing of Christendom). Evangelical Catholicism declines the embrace of state power as incompatible with the proclamation of the Gospel: the Gospel is its own warrant, and the power of that warrant is blunted when coercive state power is put behind it, however mildly. Evangelical Catholicism is also wary of a direct role by the Church, as institution, in the affairs of the state. There may be moments when a robustly evangelical Church must speak truth to power, directly and through its ordained episcopal leadership, bringing the full weight of their unique form of authority to bear on a matter in public dispute. But the normal mode of the Church's engagement with public life will not be that of another lobbying group. Rather, Evangelical Catholicism takes its lead from the Second Vatican Council's Decree on the Laity (Apostolicam Actuositatem), and from Blessed John Paul II's teaching in the encyclicals Redemptoris Missio and Centesimus Annus and the post-synodal apostolic exhortation Christifideles Laici: it seeks to form the men and women who will, in turn, shape the culture that creates a politics capable of recognising the transcendent moral norms that should guide society's deliberations about the common good.