Countries cannot have long-run economic prosperity and freedom without actively allowing for and promoting religious liberty.

From Religious, Civil, and Economic Freedoms: What's the Chicken and What's the Egg? by Christos Makridis.  From the Abstract:

This paper studies the relationship between religious liberty and economic freedom. First, three new facts emerge: (a) religious liberty has increased since 1960, but has slipped substantially over the past decade; (b) the countries that experienced the largest declines in religious liberty tend to have greater economic freedom, especially property rights; (c) changes in religious liberty are associated with changes in the allocation of time to religious activities. Second, using a combination of vector autoregressions and dynamic panel methods, improvements in religious liberty tend to precede economic freedom. Finally, increases in religious liberty have a wide array of spillovers that are important determinants of economic freedom and explain the direction of causality. Countries cannot have long-run economic prosperity and freedom without actively allowing for and promoting religious liberty.

I would recast the closing sentence by broadening it to - 

Countries cannot have long-run economic prosperity and freedom without actively allowing for and promoting religious liberty.

Freedom of speech and freedom of religion and freedom of association and freedom of movement are all aspects of the same thing - Liberty.

This is one of the two key challenges I have always thought about in terms of China's four decade growth achieved by providing greater market freedom without expanding any of the other freedoms.

The first challenge was demographic - could they grow rich before they grew old.  It has been a close run thing and might still come off the rails but it seems like they might have pulled this off.

The second challenge is more incremental.  Can you coercively maintain a partially free state.  The answer is obviously of course.  For a while.  But for how long?  We don't know the answer but it is almost certain that the longer they continue with limited but necessary freedom, the more likely challenges are going to rise against the coercion restricting all the other freedoms.