A Whites-Only Religious Group Is Trying to Move Into a Small Midwestern Town
A whites-only religious sect looking to expand its presence in the Midwest has decided that a tiny farming community with a population of 292 people is the right spot for it.
On Wednesday, the city council of Murdock, Minnesota, located about 115 miles from Minneapolis, is set to vote on whether they should welcome the Asatru Folk Assembly into their community by giving them a permit to use an old Lutheran church as a place of worship. The group purchased the abandoned church for $45,000 earlier this year, the Star Tribune reported.
Asatru Folk Assembly says it’s a religion drawn on pre-Christian European spiritual traditions, and is registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit religious organization. Their core messages of ethnic purity and white nationalism are thinly cloaked with language like “preservation of heritage” and “European ethnicity.” They insist they’re not racist but explicitly state that maintaining whiteness is a guiding principle.
“We in Asatru support strong, healthy, white family relationships,” they write in their statement of ethics. “We want our children to grow up to be mothers and fathers to white children of their own.”
Asatru Folk Assembly’s plans for the town of Murdock have sparked a backlash in the small community, the Star Tribune reported. After they bought the church, locals formed a new group called Murdock Area Alliance Against Hate. About 50 activists with the group showed up to a public hearing before the city council on Oct. 14 to express their opposition to the Asatru Folk Assembly, the Tribune wrote, and many planned to protest the meeting on Wednesday. The town is 99 percent white, according to the most recent Census data.
“There are young children of color across the street from the church,” Murdock resident Victoria Guillemard, a law student, told Minnesota Public Radio in October. “So to have that hateful ideology, especially in a community that might not immediately view this group as extremely dangerous, move into a town … I knew that our local government would not necessarily step up and speak out against it.”
At that October meeting, Asatru Folk Assembly board member and Florida attorney Allen Turnage responded to questions from members of the community. He said that Black people aren’t allowed to join the group “because they’re not of Northern European descent,” the Tribune reported.
The Asatru Folk Assembly says it has communities in at least 16 U.S. states, plus Ireland, Canada, South Africa, Sweden, Italy, and Norway. It currently has two “hofs” — meaning gathering halls — in the U.S., one in California and the other in North Carolina, according to their website. They acquired the church in Linden, North Carolina, in April of this year. If the Murdock City Council votes in favor of allowing the Asatru Folk Assembly to use the church as their place of worship, the small Minneapolis community will become home to their third hof.
The group was established in 1994 in Grass Valley, California, by Stephen McNallen, a leading figure in the modern paganism movement. While Asatru is a long and complicated religious tradition that is not racist in and of itself, its application in modern America has centered on ideas of white racial purity. In 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) designated the Asatru Folk Assembly as a hate group, stating that it fell under the category of “Neo-Volkish” ideologies, which co-opt existing spiritual traditions and turn them into vehicles for promoting white supremacy or pro-white conspiracy theories.
“Present-day Folkish adherents also couch their bigotry in baseless claims of bloodlines grounding the superiority of one’s white identity,” the SPLC writes. “At the cross-section of hypermasculinity and ethnocentricity, this movement seeks to defend against the unfounded threats of the extermination of white people and their children.”
Last December, the National Guard expelled two of its own members after Atlanta antifascists exposed them as adherents of Asatru Folk Assembly who had attended an event held by the prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer.
Asatru Folk Assembly did not immediately return VICE News’ request for comment.
DMT.NEWS
via https://www.DMT.NEWS
Tess Owen, Khareem Sudlow
