The Asatru Folk Assembly had approximately 730 members and five active temples as of April 2025. The number of neo-Volkisch groups in the United States grew from 40 in 2023 to 53 in 2024. These are not fringe statistics. The white nationalist entryism in Heathenry is organized, growing, and actively recruiting. Every practitioner of this tradition needs to understand it clearly.
This post covers what folkish Heathenry is, where it came from, what the current landscape looks like, and what the broader Heathen community is doing about it.
What Folkish Heathenry Is
The term folkish in the Heathen context refers to the position that Norse and Germanic paganism is an ethnic religion, the spiritual heritage of people of Northern European ancestry, and that access to it should be restricted on that basis. The most prominent folkish organization is the Asatru Folk Assembly (AFA), whose founding documents state that if the ethnic European folk cease to exist, Asatru would likewise cease to exist. Their membership policies restrict participation to people they classify as white.
The AFA was founded by Stephen McNallen in 1994 as a successor to the earlier Asatru Free Assembly, which had disbanded in 1986 partly over conflicts about race and inclusion. McNallen developed a concept he called metagenetics, the argument that religious and spiritual sensibilities are genetically inherited, and that the Norse religious tradition is therefore inaccessible to people without Northern European ancestry. This claim has no support in genetics, archaeology, anthropology, or the historical record of the tradition itself. It is a post-hoc rationalization for racial exclusion, not a scholarly position.
The History of the Problem
The association of Norse and Germanic symbolism with white nationalist ideology predates modern Heathenry as a religious movement. Nazi Germany made extensive use of Norse imagery, including the SS’s use of runic symbolism and the ideological framework of Nordic racial superiority. When modern Heathenry emerged as a distinct religious movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, it was born into a landscape where that association already existed, and some of its founders did not try very hard to distance themselves from it.
The split in the Asatru Free Assembly in 1986, which produced both the AFA and the more inclusive Ring of Troth (later The Troth), was partly about this question. The Troth was explicitly universalist from its founding, welcoming members regardless of race, ethnicity, or ancestry. The AFA took the opposite position. These two organizations represent the major organizational fault line in American Heathenry, and that fault line has never fully healed.
The problem intensified during the period of alt-right visibility from roughly 2015 to 2021. The AFA became more explicit in its alignment with white nationalist politics. Norse imagery and runes appeared prominently at white nationalist events including the Charlottesville rally in 2017. The SPLC classified the AFA as the largest neo-Volkisch hate organization in the United States. This reflects documented history, documented organizational statements, and documented connections between AFA members and violent extremism.
Declaration 127 and the Community Response
Declaration 127, first published in 2016, is a statement by Heathen and pagan organizations explicitly condemning the AFA and disassociating from its positions. It was named after AFA’s original statement number in a numbered series of public communications. As of 2024, it was formally transferred to the stewardship of The Troth, which is working to update and maintain it as a living document.
The Declaration has been signed by hundreds of organizations ranging from national Heathen bodies to local kindreds, individual clergy, and community leaders. It is a significant statement of where the mainstream of the Heathen community stands on this question.
The limits of the Declaration are also real. The AFA and similar organizations are aware of it and have not changed their positions in response. The far-right wing of Heathenry has not been deterred by denunciations. Heathens United Against Racism, formed in 2012, has argued that active counter-engagement is necessary beyond mere denunciation, including pressuring event venues to cancel folkish events and actively producing inclusive counter-content that defines the tradition on different terms.
What the Historical Record Says
The folkish argument fails on its own historical terms. The Norse and Germanic peoples of the pre-Christian period did not practice their religion on the basis of racial purity. The Viking Age Norse world was a cosmopolitan one: Norse traders and settlers interacted with and integrated into populations across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. The Varangian Guard in Constantinople included Norse warriors serving a Byzantine emperor in a multiethnic imperial force. The Arabic traveler Ibn Fadlan’s account of a Norse funeral on the Volga describes a living community with contact and exchange across cultural lines.
Furthermore, the pre-Christian Germanic world had no concept of race in the modern sense. The categories that mattered were tribal, cultural, and relational: who you were kin to, what oaths you had sworn, what community you belonged to, not what genetic heritage you carried. Applying modern racial categories to ancient Germanic practice is a historical anachronism. It projects a 19th and 20th-century European obsession onto a pre-modern world that did not share it.
What Serious Practitioners Can Do
Being clear about this issue with newcomers is the most basic thing. The folkish organizations recruit actively, and newcomers who do not know the landscape can stumble into AFA-affiliated spaces without understanding what they are entering. Visibility matters: the inclusive wing of Heathenry needs to be as visible as the folkish wing, preferably more so.
Supporting inclusive organizations is practical. The Troth, Heathens United Against Racism, and other explicitly anti-racist organizations are doing active work. They produce scholarship, train clergy, operate community resources, and maintain the argument that the tradition belongs to those who engage with it seriously, not those who claim racial entitlement to it.
Reading the primary sources yourself is also, ultimately, one of the best responses. The Norse tradition, read directly, does not support the AFA’s positions. Odin does not demand ancestral credentials from his devotees. The mythology is not a document of racial purity. The more practitioners engage with the actual sources rather than with ideologically preloaded interpretations of them, the less purchase the folkish argument has.
