Whatever happened to Freedom FROM Religion?

I just came across this article in the March issue of The American Spectator (you have to know your enemy!) but which is subscription only. Fortunately, it also appears here, The Religious Information Service of Ukraine.

David Aikman's article about Viktor Yushchenko's "orange revolution" offers another perspective on the recent elections there:

"Even TVs cable networks seemed colorblind to what was going on in Ukraine despite the unusual nature of its "orange revolution" as did the prestige dailies and the news magazines. But what happened in Ukraine was not just a struggle of pro democracy, pro West forces against the corruption and repressiveness of the old heirs of Soviet style autocracy. It was, in large part, the spontaneous uprising of Ukraine's new evangelical Protestant churches against the threat that a Russian style clampdown on non Orthodox Christians might be one of Yanukovych's first orders of business.

The emergence of a new evangelical constituency in Ukraine was a direct consequence of the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. Protestant missionaries flocked into Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine by the hundreds and thousands, many of them mom and pop teams from the US who knew little about the cultures they were seeking to evangelize. Russia and Belarus soon reacted harshly, enacting laws that gave the Orthodox Church in each country virtual monopoly on religious activity."

I remain one of those few sceptics who regard all religions as little more than an excuse for a hierarchy of snake-oil salesmen to exploit the credulousness, poverty, and alienation of millions of people struggling to come to terms with the meaninglessness and demystification accompanying modernity. Call me a cynical old fucker, but when evangelists pour into a "newly freed" country, I see a new form of enslavement quickly taking shape. How can the locals see this sort of intrusion as anything other than an act of aggression?