At its best, of course, science fiction is a serious literature of ideas that explores them through three-dimensional characters and fine style; like most of us, SF has those mornings when it is not at its best, but even then it is a form that has interesting things to say about almost everything. A lot of the founding parents of SF were slightly dogmatic agnostic progressives who generally saw religion as obscurantist and reactionary; if you are writing technophilic social satire, cardinals and high priests are almost a default set of villains. More interestingly, religion offered both gaudy backdrops for stories and interesting ideas from which stories could grow.
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