As the sun began to set on the Tbilisi suburb of Gldani on October 17th of 1999, the sound of distant shouting echoed through the streets. Unbeknownst to its residents, this heralded the arrival of a violent mob of Georgian men—led by former Orthodox priest Vasily Mkalavishvili—with plans to attack a group of Jehovah's Witnesses at their weekly meeting for worship. The sixty Jehovah’s Witnesses who were in the main room of the meeting house—having been in a worship service only a few moments prior—were ambushed and “beaten and struck with crosses, sticks, and belts” by the mob. Mkalavishvili encouraged his supporters to join him “in prayer and song” as they carried out the attack. In the following weeks, it became clear that the police, the judiciary, the government, the Church, and the Georgian people themselves all at least tacitly believed that what he was doing was good for their country, as both state and non-state actors lent their support to Mkalavishvili. And—horrifically—this was not an isolated expression of hate towards a minority group in Georgia. Many others followed, targeting other religious minorities, ethnic minorities, foreigners, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Some people—like Bishop Malkhaz Songulashvili of the Evangelical Baptist Church of Georgia—have argued that Mkalavishvili and his associates were only “small fries” who “carried out [these] attacks on the orders of others.” Allowing the discourse surrounding religious violence to remain fixed on people like Mkalavishvili would leave the public with the idea that it was only those who carried out the attacks who were responsible—thus neglecting the importance of other individuals and institutions. While Songulashvili was right to pinpoint a deeper cause for the religious violence in Georgia, the question of responsibility cannot be answered if it is framed as a discussion of individuals and institutions alone. The intolerance clearly came from a deeper source. I argue that a particular vision of Georgian national identity itself—and its construction around Georgian Orthodox Christianity and the Georgian Orthodox Church—animated the politics of Georgia after its independence to disastrous effect. This paper, therefore, examines how and why religion has been centered in Georgian identity discourse, and by extension, politics.

This paper is available here.