I think the feelings you (and I) had that “my conservative evangelical church would want to take Jesus’ teachings seriously,” were not naive but simply picking up on the orthodoxy seriousness. Or perhaps the seriousness was related to maintaining a social order that had little to do with what was in the Bible but a whole lot to do with talking alot about the Bible.

Hence the old story where a preacher gives two messages with opposite feedback from the congregation: one message where the themes and conclusions came from careful exegesis but in which he never quoted scripture, and another message in which he quoted the Bible left, right, and sideways but all his conclusions were not drawn from the text. The congregation loved one message and hated the other; guess which one was which!