Phil Zuckerman and Dan Cady explain in the Huffington Post Why Evangelicals Hate Jesus. Their perspectives on American Christianity, apparently as outsiders and unbelievers, are shocking:

The results from a recent poll published by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Tea-Party-and-Religion.aspx) reveal what social scientists have known for a long time: White Evangelical Christians are the group least likely to support politicians or policies that reflect the actual teachings of Jesus.

Of course this doesn’t exactly mean that they hate Jesus:

Evangelicals don’t exactly hate Jesus — as we’ve provocatively asserted in the title of this piece. They do love him dearly. But not because of what he tried to teach humanity. Rather, Evangelicals love Jesus for what he does for them. … And yet, as for Jesus himself — his core values of peace, his core teachings of social justice, his core commandments of goodwill — most Evangelicals seem to have nothing but disdain.

Now I’m sure the response of many politically (and perhaps also theologically) conservative Christians would be that the listed “policies that reflect the actual teachings of Jesus” are not in fact Christian policies at all. Indeed some of them are highly debatable, although others are not, such as supporting “punitive punishment over rehabilitation” and rejecting “anything that might dare to help out those in need”. And the article doesn’t mention another whole category of “policies that reflect the actual teachings of Jesus”, concerning family life, which are strongly supported by evangelicals but not so much by the liberal left which the writers seem to represent.

Nevertheless the way that a whole raft of right wing policies, those associated with the Tea Party, have become associated so closely with evangelicalism is a real scandal and stumbling block making it hard for unbelievers, especially those with more liberal views, to turn to Christ.

Of course the authors are right that

People look at the content of their religious tradition — its teachings, its creeds, its prophet’s proclamations — and they basically pick and choose what suits their own secular outlook.

North American evangelicals mostly support these policies because the majority of them are from socially highly conservative areas and strata of society. It would be interesting to compare the political views of evangelicals with those of their unbelieving neighbours: I suspect that there would not be very much difference. So the authors are again right when they conclude about these conservative positions:

it is just strange and contradictory when they claim these positions as somehow “Christian.” They aren’t.