Dispatch – March 3: Trucks Who Pray

There are many believers in Georgia, but none worship as loudly as the local trucks. You can spot them rushing through the suburbs or driving across the countryside; some carry cargo, others transport cement to construction sites, leaving dust in their wake as they roar through narrow streets. There are those with larger trailers who appear to be heading on longer cross-border journeys. What some of them have in common is a large inscription on the front, with crosses before and after, reading: “Lord, have mercy upon us.”

It’s quite common for vehicles here to display religious symbols, and it’s not surprising. Even a short experience on Georgian roads could convert the most stubborn atheist. But those symbols usually remain inside the car, dangling intimately from the rearview mirror, or appearing more modestly on the back. The large trucks, however, show no such restraint.  The prayer is all loud, open, and clear, and it is the first (or the last) thing you see as you turn your head into the approaching rumbling noise.

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Here is Nini and the Dispatch newsletter, following praying trucks to explore faith and power in Georgia.

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It’s understandable why Georgian trucks would practice their faith more openly than anyone else. Larger size, greater power, and longer hours spent on the road only increase their destructive potential, and they could indeed use some mercy from God, not only to protect them but also to protect others from them. This life isn’t always kind to them, so the trucks must at least secure a decent afterlife.

Trucks need to pray, and they need to do it aloud. After so many years on the road, they may have learned the bitter truth: God’s blessings are usually concentrated in the center, somewhere downtown, places they rarely venture into. As they noisily roam distant, dilapidated roads, through sites ruined or still under construction, they need to be more vocal than others to make their voices heard through the complex structures of the divine bureaucracy.

And then there’s time, or rather, the scarcity of it. If passenger cars can head home in the evening and drive to a church service the next Sunday morning, trucks have none of that luxury. Chances are they’re burning midnight oil far from home on that very Sunday morning, and on many other mornings. To stay close to heaven, they need to carry their shrines with them and their prayers on them. Or perhaps these trucks are not as self-centered as we presume: having traveled the world, they must have witnessed many of its evils. God needs to hear about it — about all the injustice and hardship plaguing the earth — and send mercy whenever and wherever possible.

Trucks may believe in many things and carry observations we cannot question. They may have lived to see that prayer has indeed protected them, and others around them, from the worst dangers of the roads or life in general.

And yet their loud prayers raise a parallel theological question: what do we, the fragile mortals, believe in as we turn our heads toward a deafening roar to see those praying trucks racing our way? What is our faith in those very moments when, frozen in time and space, our minds instinctively recite that prayer, not knowing whether we’ll survive this monstrous yet blessed encounter?

Great Temptations

For decades, it has been a widely known truth that believers constitute a majority in Georgia. The Georgian Orthodox Church has consistently topped the rankings of the most-trusted institutions, while its leader has steadily maintained the status of the country’s most favored public figure.

The power enjoyed by the Church and religion naturally presented politicians with great temptations to exploit it. Yet for many years, rulers (more or less) exercised restraint. Rather than taking advantage of religious sentiments, they typically chose to accommodate them through what critics saw as preferential treatment towards the most powerful church. But when it came to political discourse, the most powerful players did not so much take the Lord’s name in vain beyond occasional, petty campaign populism.

Some have tried and failed. Every now and then, a pious man would grow rich and decide to buy a stairway to heaven, or at least a ladder to government cabinets. Those false prophets would come out swinging crosses, icons, and prayers, speaking in the name of God in an apparent hope that voters would pick them only to spare themselves burning in hell. But the wise nation was not so easily fooled: when faced with a choice between prayer and power, it opted for the more tangible truth, forcing those with theocratic tendencies to return whence they came, which was usually somewhere close to Moscow.

But that’s how it was until 2020. Then things began to change: Georgia’s rulers must have felt their grip on power slipping, and started to increasingly bother God above to come to their rescue.

Heaven and Its Boundaries

The initial phase fused religion and nationalism to portray the main political rivals, mainly from the former government, as rootless and godless. The reappointment of Irakli Garibashvili, a pious family man with a habit of kneeling at holy rivers, as prime minister in 2021 helped sustain and project that narrative.

Then, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Georgian Dream began rolling out its first repressive laws, the party seemed to require a little more of that God each week. Religion was needed not only to frame every critic as a satanist, but also to provide its comfort-loving support base with moral justification: you might be cowardly enough to withhold even verbal support from an ally under attack, and ignorant enough to turn a blind eye to the oppression of your fellow citizens, but that’s how God wants you to be, that’s what it takes to protect Christian values.

Later, in 2024, the party pushed its theocratic drive so far that even the Church began asking for respect for its boundaries. The Georgian Dream’s campaign promise to make Orthodox Christianity a state religion had to be withdrawn after senior clergy, who had largely aligned with government discourse until then, made it clear they were satisfied with the privileges they already enjoyed.

And while the clergy was better equipped to spot theological fallacies, the ruling party supporters appeared to continue enjoying their comfort zone, until that, too, became impossible. Religion and science may be different things, but even in faith, one needs consistency. Even the worst hypocrites need some logical links to align, so that they can go on lying to themselves, to God, and to those around them.

Over the past year, those links have been pried apart one by one, at a pace so frantic that it left no time to rearrange the mental cabling, to rebuild the systems of the mind. In a matter of months, the man meant to embody the country’s conservative turn – Mr. Garibashvili – was disgraced by corruption allegations and ended up behind bars. Others followed. Overnight, what had been once promoted as gospel truth became a patent lie. The government’s gods suddenly turned wrathful toward their most loyal servants, with such desperation that there was neither time nor effort to explain why. The audience was no longer expected to believe. All it was meant to do from now on was to accept.

State of Religion

Faith comes in many forms and origins. Some find God in their loneliest hours, others are introduced to the Lord by fellow believers. Some convert through experience, bitter or sweet, and others are raised to believe. Some turn to God through the love of this life, and others seek heaven for the fear of the afterlife. Whatever the source, and whatever the religion, faith is meant to serve one holy purpose: to let us move mountains when things seem impossible, to guide us through darkness with no path visible, to give us courage against all odds.

That purpose seems lost in present-day Georgia. As political apathy persists and government leaders use prayer as mere decoration for what they truly rely on – heavy force – the country finds itself in a state of someone turning their head to face a large truck, with a prayer in front, roaring in their direction. One may once have believed in greater things, and the mind may instinctively begin to recite the holy words inscribed on the heavy vehicle.

But the only faith one can afford at that very moment is that of accepting the fate.