I have heard religion described by some American conservatives as the basis for freedom. I’ve also heard it described by some American liberals as being the basis for oppression and confinement.

I don’t know about religion in general being responsible for freedom; it depends on what you mean by freedom. Ultimately, being able to do whatever you want, with no constraints, isn’t exactly freedom, because it has no purpose, meaning, direction, filter, or structure. There’s nothing to tell you to go this way rather than that way and it all becomes an impulsive mess.

That kind of freedom isn’t for anything, and ends up being more like slavery, or arbitrariness. You become enslaved to your own passions, momentary impulses, individual biases, and unconscious psychological systems. There isn’t any logos or guiding intelligence to them, no order to them, it’s just a free-for-all. Whatever instinct or emotion triumphs in the moment to moment rules.

Religion increases freedom, in my opinion, because it helps bring order to the psychological and social chaos. It provides structure and discipline over the various competing elements within the psyche and within society. And that let’s you actually deliberately accomplish things and have purposes and work to fulfill them. It brings the various instincts and emotions into organization beneath the banner of a higher purpose and organizing principle.

That’s a more robust version of freedom. Being able to go any direction but having no really compelling reason to go or not go in any of them isn’t freedom, it’s aimlessness. Real freedom is purposive, the ability to reach a desired destination or state, or at least to proceed toward it.
I think that’s why people like Jocko Willick say that discipline is freedom. Because it’s by constraining our systems and passions and capabilities according to a purpose that we bring all our warring elements into a coherent order that lets us actually proceed toward complex, multi-layered goals. And he’s hardly the first person to make that argument; people have been making it for thousands of years.
Our modern conception of freedom is probably most dependent on Judaism and Christianity, with a dash of Socrates and his disciples, because they focus so much on individual responsibility and individual agency. The two go together. They’re functions of one another. If you can have no individual responsibility then you can hardly have freedom, because you have no role in your own actions and choices. If you are to have individual freedom, then you become responsible for your actions. If you are responsible for your actions, then you have freedom, however it may be confined. You can’t seperate these two; they’re inextricable.
As the ideals behind those traditions fade, Judeo-Christian and Platonic Greek, we erode the ideological grounding of that definition of freedom. It becomes incoherent. There are other conceptions, but our society was built on that one. People like Kant and Descartes have tried to make those singular ideological propositions sit up and bark on their own, without the support of their context within a larger religious structure that cuts across all the dimensions of life, but generally that’s only been convincing to intellectuals like Kant and Descartes and not very useful for the common man. Most people kept the skepticism and dropped the moralism. Why bother working your way back to God? Why not just keep him gone and hope the bits we like that emerged from those philosophies keep working on their own? And of course thinkers like Neitzsche were very skeptical about how well that would go and what actual alternatives were likely to arise in the resultant vacuum.
Wealth, of course, removes the impression that there is any restrictive structure to the world or any limitations on us and how we have to live in the world, or even what the world is and what we are and can be. Wealth increases the impression of absolute freedom, but often erodes our posive freedom. It also erodes our willingness to listen to the universe and adapt to it rather than declaim to it and make demands of it. That’s why it is said that it’s easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Being rich makes you feel like God, like you can do anything and order the universe and your own life as you see fit, and don’t need anything outside yourself and your wealth, the source of your power.

Religion is fundamentally about learning what the nature of the world and ourselves are, what our capabilities and limitations are, and figuring out how to proceed toward a desired vision of ourselves and the world based on those constraints. It is about learning, acceptance, discipline, and action. It is about adaptation, fundamentally. But if you’re rich, you feel no need to adapt. You can adapt the world to yourself, like a little diety. So in that sense people don’t become less religious, their religion just grows smaller. It’s no longer as big as the world and and long as time, it’s as small as themselves and as short as their own life and its prejudices, interests, and desires. It’s a tiny cosmology, and the gods that rule it live within each person’s heart.
And that’s one reason why some legal and social freedoms we have enjoyed may begin to erode. When each person is a god unto themselves, or rather a competing pantheon of gods within themselves, that can create some serious conflicts. It might even remind us and disturb us, as we knock into one another, that our divine rule isn’t as absolute and unconstrained as we would like, that there is competition that crashes up against us and contradicts us and pushes back on our authority and security. And we very much don’t want to be pushed back into a game of adaptation and selection, because we might discover that we could be selected against, judged, by God, by the universe, by evolution, by the human genome, by history, whatever you like to call it. We certainly can’t let anyone call into question the fact of our our security as the chosen and blessed and divine ones.
I have to agree with Norm Macdonald and many others that there really is no such thing as a truly non-religious or atheistic person. We all have religion by nature. We have an ideological and value structure, we have direction and purpose and meaning of some kind. That’s what it is to be human. The question is simply, at what level of extension does that authority and meaning preside? At some universal, eternal level?

For many people, secure in their wealth and their own divinity, the answer is no. So, with that kind of universal God disposed of, authority simply descends down the metaphysical ladder a few steps to the nearest similar entity. Technology and wealth have eroded our belief in the authority and power of individual natural forces, the domains of the pagan gods; they have allowed us to sieze control of those domains and our destinies. We no longer fear, worship, or are controlled by them. So the most logical inheritor of moral and ideological and teleological authority (the definition of purpose and meaning) is ourselves. Humans. We’re the closest things to gods around here. Which is exactly what Neitzsche observed. We are god now, by process of elimination and inheritance.
How this affects freedom, especially freedom of speech, isn’t obvious. To some degree it is necessary to control other people to maintain our individual godhood, or the appearance of our godhood. If there really are people who genuinely disagree with us, after all, who don’t or won’t conform to our vision of what our godhood means and how it should be exercised, that could be a massive threat to us. And the resurrection or survival of the previous dead gods is just as big a threat, because their claims are in direct competition with our own divinity.

I think there’s a lot of pressure to maintain some kind of social solidarity and uniformity, in maintaining the illusion that everyone wants the same thing and thinks and acts the same, and all individual relgions have the same aims, means, natures, and outcomes.

After all, in a truly relativistic environment, indifference and autonomy are only one possible outcome. With individuals as the only true divinities (and no universal authority) what’s to prevent you from seeing everyone else as direct competition and deciding that it’s perfectly within your own interests to dominate or destroy them? You don’t have any claim other than your own authority to do so, but no one has any claim greater than their personal preference and authority to disagree. So why not get the xactly what you want? Why not have everybody against everybody, as in the days of old, when all the gods were at war with one another?
People are actually pretty savvy. They know that you have to have some mechanism to constrain the autonomy and authority of individuals. That’s why systems like the Soviet Union, which preached that there was no god but the state, and that the state was only the manifestation of the will of the workers, was so tyrannical. It was necessary to act as if there was a unity and uniformity and solidarity, to reinvent the image of God in an illusory edifice of oneness and equivalence among the people. It is a necessary lie, a religious lie. And one day that lie simply fell apart in the USSR. It just stopped existing, and the various states within it had to go find their own way. The whole system was built on lies. But lies must either be protected, or they must be lived out to their conclusions.

The reality of the USSR was that there was no equivalence, no unity, no uniform and integrated and equally prospering collective god. There was a people at war with itself and with the universe, and a hidden well of repression and bloodshed devoted to hiding the consequences of the lies.

If I could take some inspiration from the work of Thomas Sowell, particular his “Visions of the Annointed”, abridgement of free speech is a useful and perhaps necessary step in sealing off a people from the natural feedback that the market or the world or evolution or human nature or God might otherwise provide. This kind of interference is an imposition and humiliation to a people who have already achieved divinity and righteousness as a birthright of their very being. How can the great vision that exists for the freedom and independence and happiness of all mankind be allowed to do its work if people are allowed to criticize it or act out of lockstep with it?

In this case, the wisdom of the annointed must silence the complaints, opinions, and rebellion of the rabble. Their ravings are not merely divisive and distracting, they are destructive to the great work, and actively harmful and humiliating offenses against the divinity of the annointed. To invoke any higher claim or argument is, after all, to denigrate individual humanity itself (or the state, or the favored ideology) as something less than the limit of all morality and meaning. That is why there is no room for them in the glorious utopia. That is why freedom of speech must be the first thing to go in Olympus, lest the gods’ ears be tweaked by intolerant and disrespectful commentary.
We aren’t anywhere near that kind of state here in the US. But the lesson of history is that there’s also nothing really preventing us from heading there. Plenty of countries have changed, plenty have made terrible mistakes. Often in the service of their own best desires and ideals. There’s nothing to say that the freedoms and prosperity we enjoy are simply owed to us by the universe as part of our divine right and could never be lost. They’re contingent. We gained them, and we can lose them. Not all in a day. That’s not how it usually happens.

For us Americans there is a greater danger than to some, because freedom is so much of who we are and what our country and its identity is based on. Our systems is much less able to survive without freedom and what truly preserves it, because our world is much more dependent on it. It’s not clear what we will be or what will define us or hold us together if we lose the love of freedom. Russia has its own racial solidarity and oligarchal traditions to fall back on. We don’t have that. We’re a radically diverse and divergent people, united primarily by a desire for freedom. What will we be, if we are no longer the land of the free?