This week, I suddenly became a foreign agent in Georgia. I never meant to, of course. But to be honest, nothing about it surprised me.
The Georgia I’m talking about is not the Peach State but a small country of some 4 million people on the eastern coast of the Black Sea. While most of the world has turned away, it has suffered greatly since it won its independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991.
Georgia has been the ignored canary in the coal mine fueling Vladimir Putin’s revanchist dreams of reconstituting a Russian Empire. Western attention has been focused on Ukraine for most of the last three years, but it was in Georgia where Russia first tested, and bested, the West’s ability to protect its interest in the region beyond pious words.
Just four months after the indecisive April 2008 Bucharest NATO Summit — where President George W. Bush proposed to open the possibility of NATO membership to both Ukraine and Georgia, but failed to bring the rest of the alliance along with him — Russian forces entered South Ossetia, a breakaway region of Georgia. Sixteen years later, those Russian troops are still on Georgian soil.
The playbook first established there would later be used in Ukraine. Russia claimed that Georgia was committing “genocide” against a certain ethnic group on Russia’s border; it sent its forces across a poorly defended border in order to “protect” them; and it raised up a local puppet government willing to toe Moscow’s line.
Russian influence has now extended to the single largest party in Georgia’s parliament, “Georgian Dream.” Established by a Georgian-born oligarch who was not a citizen of the country when he bankrolled the party’s founding, Georgian Dream has taken an especially hard line against the rights of LGBTQ Georgians. A 2017 constitutional amendment advanced by the party declared marriage to be limited to “a union between a man and a woman for the purpose of creating a family” (which would seem to criminalize marriages for anyone over, say, 50), and it seems to view LGBTQ rights as a result of unwelcome Western influence in Georgia’s traditionally Orthodox conservative culture.
This is where I come in. I lead a group of progressive churches across Europe — the European presence of the Episcopal Church. Five years ago, we were approached by a community of young Georgians in Tbilisi eager to affiliate with us. Some (but not all) of them identify as LGBTQ. Most (but not all) are in their 20s and 30s. They were drawn to us not just because we’re a church that regards them as fully equal, but because we’re a church governed democratically.
This isn’t necessarily a heroic story. We said no — twice. It was hard for us to imagine how an Anglican church shaped by American ideas could find an audience in a place that doesn’t even use the same alphabet, much less language.
And yet they persisted — and we finally said yes. Five years later, the congregation numbers nearly 60 young people. The Archbishop of Canterbury visited them last fall.
Under Georgia’s new law, they will now be branded as instruments of a “foreign agent” — the Episcopal Church — because they receive funding from us to build their congregation. And as their bishop, I am that foreign agent.
Georgia’s constitution establishes freedom of religion, but — again, in a measure worthy of Putin — gives the Georgian Orthodox Church authority over all religious matters. While minority religions have putatively been allowed to register legally, in practical terms the authorities have systematically denied that permission to most new churches — our own included.
Members of the congregation who are also active in Georgia’s tiny Pride movement have been harassed and beaten up as part of the right-wing attacks on the Tbilisi Pride parade in 2021 — an outburst of intolerance that, not incidentally, tore down EU flags in the Georgian capital as well.
There’s no doubt that Russian influence, funding and disinformation are behind the general drift of politics in Georgia away from Western aspirations and toward a posture more aligned with Russia’s interests. If you want a glimpse of what might be in store for Ukraine if Putin prevails there, look at the protests and civil strife in Georgia.
Georgia’s agony is nothing short of the trial of democratic ideals — freedom of association, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech — in countries where a kleptocratic elite would prefer not to share their power with the people, and to wrest away what little was achieved in post-Soviet democratic revolutions. There’s a reason why both the European Union and the Council of Europe have denounced the law.
Meanwhile, we’ll do what we can to keep that little congregation of believers going — young people who dare to believe that religious conscience ought to answer to no state authority, not even foreign ones.
Mark Edington is the bishop of the Episcopal Church in Europe.