The Asatru Folk Assembly (AFA) is the largest organization in the “Neo-Völkisch” movement. A subset of the larger Germanic Neopaganism “Ásatrú” movement that seeks to revive pre-Christian belief systems of the Germanic peoples through reverence for nature, ancestor veneration, and worship of Norse gods, Neo-Völkism promotes a romanticized Viking mythos that has been used to defend white supremacy. The Asatru Folk Assembly does not admit non-white members and has been classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Stephen McNallen first founded the Viking Brotherhood in 1972, renaming it the Asatru Free Assembly two years later. This group split in 1986 due to disputes over administrative issues and differences between members who practiced polygamy and those who did not. In 1995, McNallen re-established the organization as the Asatru Folk Assembly, with a heavier emphasis on right-wing politics and racial identity.
In the AFA publication The Runestone, which he founded in 1971, McNallen put forth a theory of human consciousness that he called “metagenetics.” Based loosely on Carl Jung’s conception of the collective unconscious, McNallen posited that a “reservoir of primordial…predispositions and potentialities” runs through people, connecting them to their ancestors. He expanded this to a notion of “biological kinship,” asserting that the cultures of northern Europe are connected to the past by genetics to a collective cultural inheritance. He stated in the same issue of The Runestone that the goal of his organization was to “preserve the cultural and biological identity of the Northern peoples, from whose soul Odinism sprang.”
During the late 1990s, the group came to public attention due to its role in a legal dispute over the remains of “Kennewick Man,” an ancient skeleton discovered in Washington state that the AFA asserted were the remains of a European ancestor. McNallen attempted to connect the Kennewick Man to a narrative of white European settlement and “white genocide,” but was forced to withdraw from the case in 1999 due to a lack of funding for legal fees.
The AFA has expanded over the past decade. In August 2015, the group purchased a former Grange Hall in California, naming it “Odinshof.” The group purchased two former church buildings, one in Minnesota and one in North Carolina, in 2020, with the Minnesota acquisition drawing public protest and garnering national media attention. Another church building, this one in Florida, was purchased in 2022. The AFA had 43 chapters as of 2023, but only counted about 500 total members across these groups.
In December 2019, two members of the Army National Guard left military service under circumstances linked to their leadership roles in Ravensblood Kindred, a white nationalist religious group associated with the AFA. One of these individuals now holds a leadership position at the AFA’s Florida center. In August 2024, AFA member Zachary Babitz was arrested in New Mexico in connection with violent crimes, including murder, carjacking, and robbery. Babitz reportedly had the racist code “1488” tattooed on his hand.
In 2020, the AFA posted a video titled “The Attack on the Confederacy – We are all Confederates Now!” in which it declared, “Being a Confederate is no longer about where you live or even on which side your ancestors fought. … The same interests that are demanding an ISIS-like erasure of history when it comes to the statues of Confederate heroes are the same forces tightening the leftist and globalist stranglehold on y’all up in the North, and those of you out West, and those of you from coast to coast and around the world.”
Other Neopagan organizations joined together to condemn the AFA and to refute its claim that it represents their faith. The AFA has countered by saying that Neopagan is inherently an “ethnic European” tradition and that it represents true Neopaganism, stating, “If the Ethnic European Folk cease to exist Asatru would likewise no longer exist. Let us be clear: by Ethnic European Folk we mean white people.”
Key Sources:
The Associated Press. (2019, December 27). 2 kicked out of National Guard over white supremacist ties.
Cramer, M. (2021, January 19). Fear Spreads in Minnesota Town as ‘Extremist Group’ Moves to Open Church. The New York Times.
Gardell, M. (2003). Gods of the blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism. Duke University Press.
Johnson, D. (2018, February 18). Holy Hate: the far right’s radicalization of religion. Southern Poverty Law Center.
Joyner, C. (2019, April 17). Ga. guardsman, deputy sheriff outed for extremist posts. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Kaplan, J. (1997). Radical Religion in America: Millenarian Movements from the Far Right to the Children of Noah. Syracuse University Press.
Marohn, K. (2020, December 9). Murdock votes to allow whites-only group to use former church. Minnesota Public Radio News.
Southern Poverty Law Center. (2025, March 19). Asatru Folk Assembly.
Weber, S. (2018, February 1). White supremacy’s old gods. Political Research Associates.
Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects, and New Religious Movements 