White-only religious groups aren't new to America. Trump's helped reinvigorate them.
By Talia Lavin, MSNBC Opinion Columnist
White-only churches are making more space for white Americans who have lost faith in democracy and replaced it with Trump.
In 2015, the Asatru Folk Assembly, a religious group devoted to the worship of the Norse pantheon, opened its first physical house of worship in Brownsville, California, calling it Odinshof — the "Temple of Odin." In a celebratory post on the AFA's Facebook page, Odinshof is revealed to be a red building adorned with Nordic runes and flanked by a celebratory, posing crowd — every single one of whom is white, the California sun shining through their sheaves of blond hair.
The triumph is punctuated with a curious imprecation, with a tint of fascism: "Hail the Gods! Hail the Folk! Hail the AFA!" Much like the crowd pictured in the Facebook post, the "folk" being hailed by the AFA are unambiguously white. On its website, the religious group declares itself to be "a solid spiritual force for our ethnic European folk" and exhorts "traditionally-minded sons or daughters of Europe" to join.
The group has sought to dramatically expand its operations this year, and, amid a contentious anonymous City Council vote, the small Minnesota town of Murdock has found itself playing reluctant host to a new hof, having leased a vacant church building to the group — offering an enclave to a religion explicitly premised on white separatism.
Originally founded in the 1970s as the Viking Brotherhood, the AFA has morphed from a romantic celebration of Viking myths to an explicitly racist endeavor: what the religious scholar Matthias Gardell calls the "biologization of spirituality," the notion that "gods and goddesses are encoded in the DNA of the ancestors of the ancients" — and an abhorrence of "mixed blood." The AFA is representative of a militant strain of Norse paganism that makes a religion of whiteness itself, an ethnoreligious separatism whose boundaries are explicitly racial.
The organization's founder, Stephen McNallen, has repeatedly embraced the racist slogan known as the "14 words": "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children," first promulgated by the white supremacist terrorist David Lane. The group's current leader, Matthew Flavel, has spoken at a celebration of the centennial of American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell's birth and at a racist conference whose other guests have included Holocaust deniers, according to the West Central Tribune newspaper of Willmar, Minnesota.
The founder of modern Asatru in the United States, Else Christiansen — a Danish weaver and National Socialist for whom the AFA held a Day of Remembrance in May — envisioned Norse worship as a way to reclaim the blood heritage of whiteness and achieve "Aryan spiritual liberation" through the establishment of separatist, white-only tribal societies.
There have been rumblings of dissent in Murdock against these white supremacist interlopers — the Murdock Alliance Against Hate spoke out against the conditional use permit for the church before it was granted, and the antiracist group Heathens Against Hate has offered support — but the AFA's new expansion is just one small part of a broader tide of white separatism, explicit and implied, sweeping the country in the chaotic wake of the Trump era.
READ MORE: White-only religious groups aren't new to America. Trump's helped reinvigorate them.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/white-only-r...
Posted By: Dea. Ron Gray Sr.
Monday, December 21st 2020 at 2:37PM
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