That's exactly what it is. Different groups optimizing for different outcomes.
For most religious folk, teens having sex is bad regardless of whether it's safe or not, so it makes sense to push for abstinence-only education. Giving out condoms is like giving up. Or maybe even slightly worse than giving up - implicitly encouraging kids to go out and have sex.
Of course, this doesn't stop kids from having sex, but it does make it so that when they do they're generally unprotected.
I've worked heavily with teenagers over the past 10 years, mostly in the context of summer camps (where 40 teenagers are spending 3 weeks of their summer in close quarter).
Where I'm from, France, you need a state certificate to work as an educator (BAFA), which is issued after a few weeks of training.
In my first week of training, which is mostly "theoretical", we had a debate about whether to carry condoms in the camp's sanitary supplies, to give them to teenagers if they ask for them. There is no legal imperative in France - it's mostly at the discretion of the camp director/organizer. I was against, because I was a 17 year old teenager full of convictions (albeit not religious ones) that having condoms available was implicitly encouraging teenagers to have sex.
Then I worked in actual teenage camps and realized how much of an idiot I was. No matter how vigilant and organized the educators are, the fact is that you have 40 teenagers full of hormones living together for 3 weeks. If you don't want STDs/pregnancies, you need condoms.
Anytime I hear people advocating the opposite, it becomes clear to me that they are deluded idealists and that they've never had to manage a community of teenagers.
To quote my grandmother: "there's nothing [adolescents] can do at night that they won't do during daytime".
The religious right in the US has this strange obsession with other people's sex life. I think after roughly two millenia of Christians trying to prevent their kids from having extramarital sex it's safe to say that the exercise is ultimately futile and the only thing it's accomplishing is worse outcomes (e.g. STDs, pregnancies and bad decisions).
Of course debating that point is entirely useless when the underlying idea is that extramarital (and therefore also teenage) sex is the worst possible outcome in and of itself. It's a failure of humanity that 40-odd thousand years into civilization we still haven't overcome our obsessions with valuing scripture over rational thought.
For most religious folk, teens having sex is bad regardless of whether it's safe or not, so it makes sense to push for abstinence-only education. Giving out condoms is like giving up. Or maybe even slightly worse than giving up - implicitly encouraging kids to go out and have sex.
Of course, this doesn't stop kids from having sex, but it does make it so that when they do they're generally unprotected.