Assuming you mean religious denominations. If so, then yeah you have the wrong impression. Churches tend to be extremely involved in helping the poor. They're r

Assuming you mean religious denominations. If so, then yeah you have the wrong impression. Churches tend to be extremely involved in helping the poor. They're regularly involved in clothing drives, food banks, christmas gift drives, feeding the homeless, etc. You might be conflating it with American politicians who wear religion on their sleeve. Religious Americans make up a huge and disproportionate chunk of voters. This includes the traditional religious conservatives as well as a diverse group of WASP (white anglo-saxon protestant) types, but also black and Hispanic voters who are also largely religious. This is the reason for absurd pandering like Hillary Clinton stating that her favorite book was the bible. Religion, in theory, is a great thing since it encourages people to follow an [ideally] positive value system and gives people a way to meet and organize things. In practice the value systems are often pretty screwy, and the whole divine imperative turns plenty of people into self righteous assholes. In many ways modern notions of social justice are turning into a new religion and suffering the exact same problems. This is why we can't have anything nice!