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Racial Identity and Right-Wing Ideology Among Britain's Folkish Heathens

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Racial Identity and Right-Wing Ideology Among Britain's Folkish Heathens Journal of journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 241-273 Religion in Europe brill.com/jre Northern Gods for Northern Folk: Racial Identity and Right-wing Ideology among Britain’s Folkish Heathens Ethan Doyle White University College London [email protected] Abstract Heathenry, the modern Pagan religion inspired by the Germanic societies of pre- Christian Europe, is broadly divided between those embracing an inclusive, Univer- salist perspective, and those who favour a racially exclusive, Folkish alternative. This article represents the first academic analysis of Folkish Heathenry in Britain, focusing on the country’s three most visible groups: the Odinic Rite, the Odinist Fellowship, and Woden’s Folk. Examining how they promote themselves online, it explores how these organisations present an extreme right-wing socio-political vision focusing around the centrality of ‘the folk,’ while at the same time professing an officially apolitical stance. Keywords Heathenry – Paganism – Odinism – extreme right – religion and politics – England 1 Introduction “Odinism is the original, indigenous faith of the English people.”1 This state- ment, which is replete with political underpinnings and ramifications, con- stitutes the opening sentence on a website run by the Odinist Fellowship, a British group devoted to a Pagan religion commonly known as ‘Heathenry.’ Similar sentiments—which are connected to an ideological standpoint known 1 Odinist Fellowship, “All About Odinism.” http://www.odinistfellowship.co.uk/ (accessed 30 November 2015). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/18748929-01003001Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:09:20PM via free access <UN> 242 Doyle White within the Heathen community as ‘Folkish’—are echoed on the websites of other British Heathen organisations such as the Odinic Rite and Woden’s Folk. Although these groups may identify first and foremost as religious, eschew- ing any explicitly political identity, their respective worldviews are ones with strong political positions, which analytically place them on what political scientists term ‘the extreme right.’2 Heathenry is a broad contemporary Pagan new religious movement (nrm) that is consciously inspired by the linguistically, culturally, and (in some defini- tions) ethnically ‘Germanic’ societies of Iron Age and early medieval Europe as they existed prior to Christianization. This latter category encompasses such societies as Norse Scandinavia, Anglo-Saxon England, and Gothic Germany. While the term ‘Heathenry’ is likely the most widely accepted term for the re- ligion among its practitioners and the academics who have studied it, there are undoubtedly those who favour alternatives, which include ‘N orthern Tradition,’ ‘Germanic (neo)Paganism,’ ‘Asatru,’ ‘Odinism,’ ‘Wodenism,’ and ‘Wotanism.’ These different terms often express connotations that are under- stood within the Heathen community; for instance, many Folkish Heathens in the us use ‘Odinism’ because they wish to avoid terms like ‘Asatru’ which are also employed by many non-Folkish, ‘Universalist’ Heathens.3 Although this has led to the suggestion that one can divide the us Heathen community into the racialist ‘Odinists’ and the non-racialist ‘Asatruer,’ there is no neat divi- sion between the two, as many self-described ‘Asatruer’ also embrace explic- itly racialist perspectives.4 Here, therefore, I shall refer to a division between 2 Unfortunately, there remains confusion surrounding the use of such terminology, with terms like ‘far right,’ ‘extreme right,’ and ‘radical right’ being used differently by different schol- ars, often according to their own national conventions. In contemporary scholarship on the British right wing, ‘radical right’ is usually reserved for non-racialist nationalists like the uk Independence Party, with ‘extreme right’ being favoured for their racial nationalist counter- parts in the British National Party and National Front. This is the convention followed here. ‘Extreme right wing’ is not an emic term and many of those discussed in this article may not consider themselves to be ‘extreme right-wingers.’ However, it retains value as an etic term if considered purely descriptive, as opposed to pejorative. 3 Mattias Gardell, Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 165. 4 Jeffrey Kaplan, “The Reconstruction of the Ásatrú and Odinist Traditions,” in: James R. Lewis (ed.), Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 193–236, at 200. That this is an imperfect division was stressed by Gardell, Gods of the Blood, 152. Here, ‘racialism’ refers to a belief in the fundamental biological difference be- tween distinct human races; when applied to Heathenry it means those Folkish groups that restrict membership to those belonging to a particular ethnic group. journal of religion inDownloaded europe from 10 Brill.com09/29/2021 (2017) 241-273 06:09:20PM via free access <UN> Northern Gods for Northern Folk 243 ‘Folkish Heathens,’ who deem Heathenry to be a religion geared for a particular racial or ethno-cultural group (whether conceptualised as ‘Nordic,’ ‘white,’ or ‘Aryan’), and the ‘Universalist Heathens’ who hold to no such restriction. This former category can in turn be sub-divided into an explicitly white separatist, ‘racial-religious’ faction which typically exhibits a fixation with concepts like racial purity and race war, and an ‘ethnicist’ faction which retains the essential- ist belief in a link between Heathenry and the racially or culturally ‘Germanic’ peoples, but which is otherwise more moderate and less openly revolutionary in its views.5 Like most Pagan faiths, Heathenry has failed to receive the levels of academ- ic enquiry that have been directed toward the larger and better known Pagan religion of Wicca.6 Nevertheless, there has been a range of studies produced that have examined Heathenry in the United States, with a particular focus on the country’s extreme right groups.7 There have also been studies conducted on the movement in continental Europe, including on the development of Heathenry in the völkisch milieu of the early twentieth century.8 Heathenry 5 This threefold division was previously highlighted by Gardell, Gods of the Blood, 153. The terms ‘racial-religious’ and ‘ethnicist’ are borrowed from Stefanie von Schnurbein, Norse Revival: Transformations of Germanic Neopaganism (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 6. 6 For a summary of the latter, see Ethan Doyle White, Wicca: History, Belief, and Community in Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2016). 7 Kaplan, “Reconstruction”; Jeffrey Kaplan, Radical Religion in America (Syracuse: Syracuse Academic Press, 1997), 66–99; Betty A. Dobratz, “The Role of Religion in the Collective Iden- tity of the White Racialist Movement,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 40/2 (2001), 287–301; Gardell, Gods of the Blood; Michael F. Strmiska, “Putting the Blood Back into Blót: The Revival of Animal Sacrifice in Modern Nordic Paganism,” The Pomegranate 9/2 (2007), 154–189; Thad N. Horrell, “Heathenry as a Postcolonial Movement,” Journal of Religion, Iden- tity, and Politics 1/1 (2012), 1–14; Jennifer Snook, “Reconsidering Heathenry: The Construction of an Ethnic Folk-way as Religio-ethnic Identity,” Nova Religio 16/3 (2013), 52–76; Jennifer Snook, American Heathens: The Politics of Identity in a Pagan Religious Movement (Philadel- phia: Temple University Press, 2015); Murphy Pizza, “Fire and Ice in Midvestjard: American Religion and Norse Identity in Minnesota’s Heathen Community,” Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review 5/2 (2014), 261–268. 8 Michael F. Strmiska, “Ásatrú in Iceland: The Rebirth of Nordic Paganism,” Nova Religio 4/1 (2000), 106–132; Michael F. Strmiska & Baldur A. Sigurvinsson, “Asatru: Nordic Paganism in Iceland and America,” in: Michael F. Strmiska (ed.), Modern Paganism in World Cul- tures (Santa Barbara: abc-clio, 2005), 127–179; Egil Asprem, “Heathens Up North: Politics, Polemics, and Contemporary Norse Paganism in Norway,” The Pomegranate 10/1 (2008), 42–69; Kennet Granholm, “‘Sons of Northern Darkness’: Heathen Influences in Black Metal and Neofolk Music,” Numen 58/4 (2011), 514–544; Matthew H. Amster, “It’s Not Easy Being Apolitical: Reconstructionism and Eclecticism in Danish Asatro,” in: Kathryn Rountree (ed.), journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 241-273 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:09:20PM via free access <UN> 244 Doyle White in the United Kingdom has also been explored, with a particular focus on its neo-shamanic elements.9 As these studies make apparent, Heathenry exhib- its unique characteristics in different national contexts; in the words of Egil Asprem, these nrms “will always involve adaptation to local cultural and po- litical circumstances.”10 Here I seek to examine one sector of the Heathen community—Britain’s Folkish Heathens—by paying particular attention to the relationship that they exhibit between religion and politics. Before doing so it is pertinent to highlight the words of anthropologist Jennifer Snook, who studied American Heathenry, when she noted that: Heathenry (like all religions) is intimately connected to “the political”— to how its adherents conceptualize and enact various identities (gender identity, political identity, ethnic identity) and how they patrol the bor- ders of these identities in order to maintain a sense of authenticity and legitimacy and to protect what it means to be “Heathen” and not
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