A Libertarian has a Question

Do you agree or disagree with this statement:

The Catholic Church can best evangelize the culture when the State is small and less interfering, than a State that is large and more interfering.”

On the whole, I find it easier to evangelize in the US than in a libertarian paradise like Somalia or Haiti.

The fantasy that a massive, globe-spanning, industrialized superpower like the United States is going to have a government tooled for a small Jeffersonian agricultural economy is just that: fantasy.

The assumption that a large state and even an “interfering” state is necessarily an evil state is… unproven. Both the US and the Soviet Union had large “interfering” states. One was an unjust tyranny. The other did (and still does) a reasonable job of providing for the common good.

Meanwhile, states fulfilling the Libertarian dream of “every man for himself” are third world crapholes.

Certainly I see nothing in Catholic teaching tells us the formula provided by the question is anything like the desideratum. The state should be as larges as it need to be to provide for the common good, not as small as it needs to be to satisfy libertarian dogma. Evangelism got easier, not harder, with the rise of the nation-state in medieval Europe. It remains notoriousl difficult in land dominated by Bronze Age tribes ruled by warlords. And wherever the gospel takes root, civilization (and the governmental mechanisms to institutionalize it) take root too.