Modern Heathenry is growing. It is also in the middle of an extended and sometimes ugly public argument about what it is, who belongs in it, and what it is for. Both of these things are true at the same time, and the tension between them is one of the most important dynamics shaping where the tradition goes next.
This is an honest assessment of where Norse and Germanic paganism stands in 2026 and what it needs to develop well in the years ahead.
What the Community Looks Like Now
Modern Heathenry is a genuinely international movement. In Iceland, the Asatruarfelagid is a legally recognized religious organization with thousands of members, officiating at weddings and funerals and operating as a recognized part of civil society. In Norway, Asatrufellesskapet Bifrost takes an explicitly anti-racist position and operates with growing membership. In Germany, Eldaring has over 700 members as of 2026 and is embedded in the broader European pagan community. In the United States, The Troth is the largest inclusive international Heathen organization, with active prison ministry, clergy training, and annual gatherings.
Alongside these organized structures, there are thousands of solitary practitioners, small kindreds, and online communities practicing across every branch of the tradition. The digital community is substantial: podcasts, YouTube channels, Substacks, Discord servers, and social media communities dedicated to Heathenry reach audiences that the formal organizations cannot. The total number of people who identify as Heathen or Norse pagan is difficult to estimate reliably, but is certainly in the tens of thousands in the United States alone, and growing.
The Ongoing Fault Line
The major internal conflict in Heathenry, the folkish versus inclusive split, is not resolved and is not going away. The SPLC documented an increase in neo-Volkisch groups from 40 to 53 in 2024. The AFA has five active temples and is expanding its programming. These are facts about the current landscape that cannot be wished away or described as historically settled.
The inclusive community has responded with sustained organizational effort. Declaration 127, now under The Troth’s stewardship, continues to accumulate signatories. Heathens United Against Racism has maintained an international presence. Individual content creators who take an explicitly inclusive stance reach significant audiences. The scholarly community that studies Heathenry as an academic subject has been consistent in documenting the white nationalist entryism and in supporting the inclusive wing’s historical arguments against the folkish position.
What has not yet happened: a definitive resolution that leaves folkish Heathenry marginalized in the way that, say, explicit racism in some other religious movements has been. The fault line is structural, it goes back to the beginning of the modern movement, and it requires ongoing active engagement rather than a one-time resolution.
The Scholarship Is Getting Better
One of the most positive developments in contemporary Heathenry is the improving quality of scholarship available to practitioners. Neil Price’s The Children of Ash and Elm (2020) represents a significant advance in accessible, rigorous scholarship on Viking Age religion and culture. The field of Norse and Germanic studies continues to produce important work, including new research on seidr, on the archaeological record of religious practice, and on the Continental Germanic tradition. University courses on Old Norse religion and mythology are increasingly available.
The gap between academic scholarship and practitioner communities, which has been wide and sometimes adversarial, is slowly narrowing. More practitioners engage directly with academic sources. More academics write for general audiences. This is good for the tradition’s long-term development, because a tradition that is willing to be corrected by evidence is more sustainable than one that insulates itself from scrutiny.
The Digital Community: Promise and Problem
The online Heathen community is large and productive. It provides access to scholarship, community, and practice support for people in geographic areas where no physical kindred exists. It has been critical for the internationalization of the movement. It has also produced some of the most egregious examples of poor practice and bad information circulating at scale: invented mythology, exaggerated claims, and spaces where the folkish argument is advanced under the appearance of historical legitimacy.
The digital community is where most newcomers encounter Heathenry first. What they find depends heavily on the specific channels and communities they land in. The quality of that first encounter, whether it leads them toward the primary sources and the inclusive community, or toward a romanticized and potentially politically compromised version of the tradition, has real consequences for the tradition’s trajectory.
What the Tradition Needs
Several things stand out as the most pressing needs for Heathenry’s healthy development over the next decade.
More and better public scholarship that is accessible to practitioners without academic backgrounds. The tradition’s strength over the long term depends on practitioners who can engage critically with the sources and evaluate claims honestly. That kind of engagement requires accessible scholarly resources, and more are needed.
A clearer public identity for the inclusive wing of the movement. The folkish organizations are well organized and visible. The inclusive organizations are also organized and visible, but they sometimes struggle to define the tradition’s identity proactively rather than primarily in contrast to what they are against. A tradition that knows what it is for is more compelling than one that knows only what it is against.
Serious engagement with the question of what the tradition is actually about at a cosmological and ethical level. The debates about race and inclusion are important and necessary. They can also crowd out the theological and philosophical work of understanding what Norse and Germanic paganism actually teaches about how to live, what the relationship between humans and divine powers looks like, and what a serious practice requires. Those questions are worth sustained attention.
A Realistic Assessment
The tradition will continue to grow. It offers something genuinely distinctive: a polytheist, animist, ancestor-centered religious framework rooted in Northern European sources, with a serious body of primary material, an active scholarly community, and an increasingly visible practitioner base. For people who feel called to it, there is nowhere else to go.
The ongoing fight over the tradition’s identity is uncomfortable but probably necessary. Traditions that do not face their internal contradictions tend to calcify around them. The inclusive Heathen community arguing publicly and persistently against the folkish organizations is doing work that matters for the long-term integrity of the tradition.
The quality of what the tradition becomes depends largely on the quality of the practitioners who engage with it seriously. That means reading the sources, being honest about what the evidence supports, practicing with integrity, building communities that can hold the weight of real commitment, and refusing to let the tradition be defined by its worst elements. That is the work. It is ongoing. And for the people for whom this tradition calls, it is worth doing.
