At the risk of being labeled a heathen, or drawn, quartered, disemboweled, or burned alive, I will state my position that a true progressive is an atheist, or at the least; agnostic. Religious dogma is antithetical to free-thinking. Religion is, in it's purest form, inhumanity; an unapologetic excuse to act as barbaric as is possible without any moral remorse.
I often think of the hypocrisy of American Christians who react in horror when they witness the beheading of another human. It's as if the vivid, and not to distant, history of their own religions' treatment of fellow humans was being viewed as an anomaly of a time past. This, as they scream for bloody retribution. This, as they happily await the return of their "king" who will slaughter all those billions on this planet who do not "believe" as they do. This, as they quote from the Book of Cosmic Superstition, (the Bible), giving credence to those passages which support their arguments, and adding to the list those passages which are not to be taken literally, anymore, due to the expansion of science and the factual understanding of the universe.
Religion is modern day mythology, and billions of humans refuse to skip ahead to the logical conclusion: that we are no more than complex organisms who have evolved over the millenniums. We are not gods, we are merely evolved, sentient animals who have yet to realize that every change we make to a system that has taken an eternity to balance, causes imbalance. Our hubris, at believing that the reason the sun rises every morning is for our personal gratification, will be our downfall. All this knowledge, yet so much profound ignorance.
Without religion, there would still be greed, sloth, bloodshed and hunger. What there wouldn't be is the crutch that those things are somehow the design of a personal creator. What there wouldn't be is "I own this because some mythical creature concocted 2,000 years ago told me so." What there wouldn't be is three major versions of life, outside of science and fact, that have divided up the real estate according some psychotic ideal of eternal, superstitious birthright. What there wouldn't be is the wholesale destruction and genocide in the name of a god that supposedly taught love for your brother as the first priority.
Can religion and liberty both exist in the same being? Obviously so; but the one does question the validity of the other. The truly great minds, such as Galileo and Jefferson would tell you it is so. The lesser minds, such as the religious right and the zealots afar, would still rather do you harm than cede you the ability to decide for yourself.