Why is religion in America always right-wing?

Comment published on New York Times blog, in response to news article, “Pope. says a strong U.S. faction offers a backward, narrow view of the Church,” August 30, 2023:

Something is horribly wrong with the often dominant discourses of religion in America. It is true of both Catholicism and Judaism, religions that have many qualities that can make them extremely liberal. The liberal motifs get buried and forgotten. We hear instead a will to control too free or deviant sexuality, in order to defend patriarchal power and force workers and the poor to obey. And to defend militarism and the power of the wealthy.

Something is rotten in the house of American 'religion' when it becomes political. The causes lay deep in American history, including the Calvinist Protestant worship of success and power, and slavery. The machinery of God talk is used to support militarist and patriarchal domination. The traditions that have been appropriated for these purposes have opposite values. Neither Judaism nor Christianity are conceivable in their roots without the concern for the poor, the stranger, the powerless, the victims. And the victims are not masses of cells but people.

The problem affects our courts, medical clinics, and schools; it affects wives and daughters, poor people and workers: Christianity is repurposed in America to mean something it is not. In America, belief in God is just obedience to the boss of it all. Religion in America is right-wing and is an alibi for reactionary interests.

We must take religion out of politics. We must stop allowing it to be anyone's excuse to think anything goes if it is what 'God' says.