The Asatru Folk Assembly (AFA) is an international Heathen organization based in the United States. It was founded by Stephen A. McNallen in 1994. Once headquartered in Grass Valley, California,Gardell 261 with chapters worldwide, the AFA is recognized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit religious organization.
The Asatru Folk Assembly practices a form of Heathenry, a modern Pagan religion, centred around the deities from Old Norse religion. Many of the rituals that AFA members devote to these deities were devised by McNallen. The AFA promotes a form of Heathenry called "folkish", meaning that they consider the religion to only be suitable for white people of Germanic ancestry. Its views on race have been labelled racist or white supremacist by some observers.
McNallen formed the Viking Brotherhood in Texas at the start of the 1970s. In 1976, when he had relocated to California, he converted it into the Ásatrú Free Assembly, which was the first national Heathen organisation in the United States. Through this group, he promoted his theory of "metagenetics", the notion that the worship of certain deities is connected to racial heredity. Stressed by internal tensions in the group and the substantial workload, McNallen closed this organisation in 1986. Concerned that new Heathen groups like The Troth had begun promoting a vision of Heathenry that was inclusive towards non-white individuals, in 1994 McNallen established the Asatru Folk Assembly. Over subsequent years, the AFA gained greater attention for making claims to the Kennewick Man body. In 2016, McNallen stepped down as leader of the group.
The organization currently has five active temples. As of April 2025, it claimed to have had approximately 730 members. The AFA's critics include external organisations like the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League as well as other Heathen groups, like The Troth, which reject folkish approaches to ethnicity. These critics have argued that the AFA is a hate group.
Definition
Heathenry has been defined as "a broad contemporary Pagan new religious movement (NRM) that is consciously inspired by the linguistically, culturally, and (in some definitions) ethnically 'Germanic' societies of Iron Age and early medieval Europe as they existed prior to Christianization". The AFA is part of the folkish wing of Heathenry. This means that they believe that a person needs to be racially descended from ancient Germanic populations to worship the Old Norse gods. This differs from the universalist Heathen stance, which argues that anyone can venerate these deities.
History
McNallen and the Viking Brotherhood
McNallen was born in 1948 in Breckenridge, Texas to a Roman Catholic family. After high school, he attended Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. There, he explored alternative religions, reading about the modern Pagan religion of Wicca and the writings of the occultist Aleister Crowley. In his freshman year of college he read a novel, Edison Marshall's The Viking, which generated his interest in pre-Christian Scandinavia. According to McNallen, upon reading this book he "got hooked on the spirit of the North". In 1968 or 1969 he dedicated himself to the worship of the deities found in Norse mythology, remaining a solitary devotee of theirs for about two years.
In 1969–70, McNallen founded the Viking Brotherhood. He issued a "Viking Manifesto" in which he stated that the Brotherhood was "dedicated to preserving, promoting and practicing the Norse religion as it was epitomized during the Viking Age, and to further the moral and ethical values of courage, individualism, and independence which characterized the Viking way of life." While the group placed greater emphasis on promoting what McNallen perceived as the Viking ideals — "courage, honor, and freedom" — than on explicitly religious goals, in 1972 they gained tax-exempt status as a religious organization from the Internal Revenue Service. In the winter of 1971–72 he began publishing a newsletter, The Runestone, using a typewriter and mimeograph machine; he gained his first eleven subscribers through an advert placed in Fate magazine.
McNallen initially called his Heathen tradition "Norse religion", before later adopting the term "Odinism" from the work of Danish Heathen and far-right activist Else Christensen. He then changed it once again, this time to "Asatru", which he had discovered in Magnus Magnusson's book, Hammer of the North, and subsequently popularized within the American Heathen community.
The Asatrú Free Assembly
Having relocated to Berkeley, California, in 1976 McNallen transformed his Viking Brotherhood into the Asatrú Free Assembly (AFA). The sociologist of religion Jennifer Snook described it as "the first national Heathen organization in the United States". According to the religious studies scholars Michael F. Strmiska and Baldur A. Sigurvinsson, the AFA "established many of the important organizational and ritual structures that remain operative" in American Heathenry into the 21st century. Initially meeting in the backroom of an insurance agency owned by group member Dick Johnson, the group later established a store-front office in Breckenridge. Through the AFA, McNallen continued publishing Runestone and produced booklets on Asatru. He also began conducting religious ceremonies, or blóts, and lectured at Pagan events across the U.S. He established groups known as guilds within the AFA to focus on particular endeavors, such as the Mead Brewing Guild and the Warrior Guild. The latter published a quarterly, Wolf Age, in which McNallen displayed his fascination for warrior ethics.
In the early 1980s McNallen used The Runestone to promote "metagenetics", his theory that spirituality or religion was encoded in genetic material and thus passed down to one's descendants. In formulating this concept he was influenced by his reading of Jungian psychology with its concept of archetypes existing within a collective unconscious. Accordingly, he described "Ásatrú as an expression of the soul of our [Nordic] race", and thought that it was a "real mistake" for anyone not of Northern European ancestry to follow Heathenry. Academic observers have characterised metagenetics as racist, and as pseudoscience.
One commentator noted that AFA membership at the time was largely a mix of hippies and neo-Nazis. As membership grew, there were an increased number of internal conflicts, often along ideological lines. This was exacerbated by the fact that all affiliated groups, known as kindreds, were autonomous, while the AFA promoted an individualistic ethos which allowed for a diversity of opinions. This generated conflicts at the AFA's annual meetings, or Althings, for instance when Michael "Valgard" Murray—one of the AFA's neo-Nazis—threatened to kill a fellow AFA member because he was gay. McNallen did not share these Nazi sympathies, disapproving of the Nazi ideal of a centralized totalitarian state, which he believed was anathema to the Heathen ideal of freedom; he also wanted to stop his religion becoming an adjunct to a specifically political movement. Accordingly, he sought to eject the neo-Nazis from the group. In 1978 he prohibited AFA members from wearing Nazi uniforms and insignia at their events.
While the autonomous nature of different AFA-affiliated individuals and groups meant that McNallen and his wife Maddy Hutter had little power, they bore the brunt of the responsibility of running the Assembly and organizing its Althings. They were also impacted by a downturn in the Texan economy, with McNallen losing his job as a jail guard. Bankrupt and frustrated, McNallen and the other senior AFA figures found themselves unable to organise the group's seventh Althing for 1987. Seeking to ensure that it would continue, McNallen assembled a committee of AFA members, the Southern Heathen Leadership Conference, which issued a document declaring that new membership would be frozen, that AFA responsibilities would be divided more widely, and that McNallen and Hutter should take a vacation from their organizational chores. However, in 1987 McNallen shut down The Runestone and dissolved the AFA altogether, relocating to Northern California. Replacing the Assembly, Murray established the Asatru Alliance (AA), which organised the eighth American Althing for Arizona in June 1988.
Foundation of the Asatru Folk Assembly
In the mid-1990s, McNallen returned to an active involvement in the U.S. Pagan scene, aided by his new partner, Sheila Edlund. They established their own Heathen group, the Calasa Kindred, which they affiliated to Murray's AA. McNallen was upset by the growth of The Troth, a universalist Heathen group that welcomed members regardless of ethnic or racial background. He later referred to this as "a corrupt faction" that "denied the innate connection of Germanic religions and Germanic people", expressing anger at the increasing domination of Heathenry by "liberals, affirmative-action Asatrúers, black goðar, and New Agers". In response to this, he decided to re-establish the AFA in 1994, this time calling it the Ásatrú Folk Assembly.
This new AFA based its headquarters in Grass Valley, and was structurally very similar to the old AFA, reviving McNallen's The Runestone publication, albeit in a yearbook format. The AFA served much the same constituency as the established AA, with religious studies scholar Jeffrey Kaplan believing that its purpose in the Heathen community was therefore largely superfluous. Seeking to promote Heathenry to a wider audience, McNallen also established the Ásatrú Community Church, which held Sunday services twice a month in the community room of the Nevada County Library; he later acknowledged that it was not particularly successful.
International links and the Kennewick Man controversy
McNallen maintained links with many other folkish Heathens throughout the 1990s. That decade, he befriended the prominent Heathen Michael Moynihan, later recommending and selling Moynihan's journal Tyr on the AFA's website. He retained friendly links with Murray and his AA, and displayed cordial relations with the racial extremist Ron McVan, co-founder of Wotansvolk, by publishing some of McVan's writings in Runestone. When in the 1990s, Christensen was arrested for drug smuggling, McNallen teamed up with Murray to form a defense fund for her. With Murray and Jeff "Heimgest" Holley of the British Odinic Rite, in September 1997 McNallen formed the International Asatru/Odinist Alliance (IAOA), a global union of folkish Heathen groups. They were later joined by representatives of the French and German branches of the Odinic Rite, before the union terminated several years later. The alliance convened an international meeting, or Althing, every three years.