Absolutely. The rise of freedom in the west owed something to liberal philosophy, but its solid foundations were laid by Christianity over the course of the middle ages.
Christianity taught that all are equal, whether Greek or Jew, man or woman, slave or free, from the time of the Apostles. And it taught the lesson already present in Judaism, that God gives men freedom of choice--something Muslims don't have a clue about. The choice given most explicitly in Deuteronomy, but seen throughout the Bible: that men are free to choose good or evil, to follow or to defy the Covenant.
This does not mean that everyone has to be a Christian to be free, but it does mean that if they start to undermine the foundations on which freedom was based, then they start leading the country into a new kind of slavery.
Peter Singer illustrates this, when he argues that a one-year-old child can be killed for convenience, and is perhaps worth less than a dog. And the Darwinists were behind the eugenics movements, the development of "scientific" notions of race in the nineteenth century, and the idea that those who fall behind in the evolutionary climb deserve no pity.
There has been quite a lot of work done, from the time of Toqueville, illustrating that freedom in America works, however imperfectly, because a majority of citizens freely choose to discipline themselves, because of their own moral sense, usually religious. The Great Awakening of the nineteenth century, for instance, played a part in preserving American freedom. Because citizens act relatively virtuously, guided by inner constraints, it is less neccessary to impose discipline from above by the police.
Again, one need not be a Jew or a Christian to follow the basic moral codes or virtues, but without religion these habits quickly degenerate into Hobbes's state of natural anarchy.
"The rise of freedom in the west owed something to liberal philosophy, but its solid foundations were laid by Christianity over the course of the middle ages."
And what follows your excellent opening quoted above is a summation of the ethics involved which is worthy of the men who struggled with those issues. Pity we don't see closer attention paid to them today. Thanks for your contribution; I won't remark on what you say because I don't see where I could improve it any.