In responding to the concept of loving one's neighbor, raised in fivefouranonymous diary Remember the Mosque Debate my comment got too long, and so here is my diary, which attempts to explain how it came to be that loving one's neighbor became Christian persona non grata.
When Jesus talked about loving one's neighbors, he wasn't talking to Christians - because there weren't any Christians. Just Jews and Gentiles.
The predominant Jewish view was that when you talked about your "neighbor," you were talking about your Jewish neighbor, and it had been that way for thousands of years.
That's why the parable of the Good Samaritan is so important to understanding how it was that Jesus intended to transform Judaism.
Christians did not exist until after Jesus died. For all practical purposes, they did not exist until the Apostle Paul established Christianity based on his claim that Jesus had appeared to him personally and told him to bring Gentiles into the fold.
The Jewish followers of Jesus remained Jewish, and initially insisted that if Gentiles wanted to be followers, they had to adopt Jewish rites, including circumcision.
Paul himself had fallings-out with the Jerusalem Church over these requirements, and spent his energy converting pagans to a religion decidedly different than that which Jesus practiced, but which used the life and teachings of Jesus to launch what would become "Christianity." Christianity implied that Jesus had, for all practical purposes, abandoned Judaism. Jesus would have been appalled, but that's another story.
Ironically, those Gentiles soon adopted the pre-Jesus Jewish view in reverse; i.e., they began to spread the meme that the Jews - not just a few Jewish leaders - were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, and the gospels, written decades later, painted the same picture, resulting in not only rejecting Jews as the "neighbors" of Christians, but persecuting them for their alleged complicity in the conspiracy against Jesus. The persecution has lasted in varying degrees for as long as Christianity has existed.
It didn't end there. Early Christians began to fight and KILL each other over doctrinal disputes that are so esoteric they are difficult for moderns to understand the ferocity behind them. This was centuries before they discovered that they should be slaughtering their Muslim neighbors as well.
So, there is a long, bloody history of giving lip service to the idea of loving one's neighbor. The tea partiers, who avoid the history of their religion so as not to "taint" their faith with facts, are giving new energy to the age-old Christian prerogative of hating their neighbors, the parable of the good samaritan notwithstanding.
Non-Christians cannot return their faith to the unadulterated teachings of Jesus. Only liberal, mainstream Christians can do that. As a non-Christian who respects Jesus and those who would emulate him, I fully support the effort, which, while it exists, as yet is too weak to have much of an impact. For all our sakes, I hope that changes.