Stephen Anthony McNallen (born October 15, 1948) is an American proponent of Heathenry, a modern Pagan new religious movement, and a white nationalist activist. He founded the Asatru Folk Assembly (AFA), which he led from 1994 until 2016, having previously been the founder of the Viking Brotherhood and the Asatrú Free Assembly.
Born in Breckenridge, Texas, McNallen developed an interest in pre-Christian Scandinavia while in college. In 1969–70 he founded the Viking Brotherhood, through which he printed a newsletter, The Runestone, to promote a form of Heathenry that he called "Asatru". After spending four years in the United States Army, he transformed the Viking Brotherhood into the Asatrú Free Assembly (AFA), through which he promoted Heathenry within the American Pagan community. He espoused the belief, which he named "metagenetics", that religions are connected to genetic inheritance, thus arguing that Heathenry was only suitable for those of Northern European ancestry. A growing membership generated internal conflict within the AFA, resulting in McNallen's decision to expel those with neo-Nazi and racial extremist views from the organisation. Under increasing personal strain, in 1987 he disbanded the Assembly.
Moving to Northern California, McNallen began a career as a school teacher; during the summer vacations he travelled the world as a military journalist, writing articles for Soldier of Fortune magazine. Concerned by what he saw as the growth of liberal, universalist ideas in Heathenry, he returned to active involvement in the Heathen movement in the mid-1990s, establishing the Asatrú Folk Assembly, which was headquartered in Grass Valley, California. In 1997 he was involved in the establishment of the International Asatru/Odinist Alliance alongside Valgard Murray's Ásatrú Alliance and the British Odinic Rite. He brought greater attention to his group after they became involved in the debate surrounding the Kennewick Man, arguing that it constituted evidence for a European presence in prehistoric America. In the 21st century he became more politically active, becoming involved in both environmentalist campaigns and white nationalist groups linked to the alt-right movement.
McNallen is a controversial figure in the Heathen and wider Pagan community. His espousal of right-wing ethnonationalist ideas and his insistence that Heathenry should be reserved for those of Northern European ancestry has resulted in accusations of racism from both Pagans and the mainstream media. Conversely, many on the extreme right of the Heathen movement have accused him of being a race traitor for his opposition to neo-Nazism and refusal to endorse white supremacism.
Biography
Early life: 1948–1976
McNallen was born in the rural town of Breckenridge, Texas on October 15, 1948, to a family of practicing Roman Catholics. After high school, he attended Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. While there, he began to investigate 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, The Viking, by Edison Marshall, which generated his interest in the societies of pre-Christian Scandinavia. According to him, upon reading this book he "got hooked on the spirit of the North", being attracted to the Vikings by what he perceived as "their warlike nature, their will to power, and their assertion of self". In 1968 or 1969 he dedicated himself to the worship of the deities found in Norse mythology, and remained a solitary devotee of theirs for about two years. He later noted that on initially becoming a Heathen, he went through "a stridently anti-Christian phase", and that while he later mellowed in his opinion of Christianity and Christians, he still believed the religion to be "a faulty faith, a foreign imposition on European soil" which had eroded "our traditional culture" and "done us great damage".
In 1969–70, McNallen founded the Viking Brotherhood, issuing 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" — rather 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 that he placed in Fate magazine. He initially used the term "Norse religion" to describe the Heathen religion that he was practicing, before later adopting the term "Odinism" from the work of Danish Heathen 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.
During his college years, McNallen had been a cadet in the Reserve Officers Training Corps, and on completion received a degree in political science. After completing his college education he joined the United States Army, remaining with them for four years, volunteering for service in the Vietnam War before being stationed in West Germany. Although frustrated at what he described as the "authoritarian stupidity" of the army, it impacted his views on warrior ethics and warrior ideals. He retained his interest in Heathenry while a member of the army, and circa 1974 adopted the belief that there was an intrinsic connection between the Norse gods and humans of Northern European descent. After his discharge from the Army in 1976, McNallen hitchhiked across the Sahara Desert before returning to Europe and then to the United States. There, he settled in Berkeley, California.
Asatrú Free Assembly and journalistic career: 1976—1993
On his return to the United States in 1976 he 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", while 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, while 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 endeavours, 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 his theory of "metagenetics"; the idea 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. Not everyone in the AFA embraced this theory, with it being rejected for instance by prominent AFA member Robert Stine, although it would later be developed in new directions by the Heathen Edred Thorsson. 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 of the AFA 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 neo-Nazis within the AFA—threatened to kill a fellow member of the Assembly 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 keep his religion apart from become an adjunct to a specifically political movement. Accordingly, he sought to push out the neo-Nazis and other racial extremists from the group. In 1978 he demanded that AFA members be prohibited from wearing Nazi uniforms and insignia at their events. Among those who left the AFA as a result were Wyatt Kaldenberg—who was appalled by what he described as McNallen's "soft stance on race" and "middle of the road" politics—and the neo-Nazi Heathen Jost Turner, who was McNallen's brother-in-law. McNallen nevertheless remained close to Turner and his family after the division. As a result of such changes, by the late 1970s there was a clear division between McNallen's AFA, which emphasized religious over racial political aims, and Christensen's Odinist Fellowship, which placed far greater emphasis on the latter.
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 figures in the AFA found that they were unable to organise the group's seventh Althing for 1987. Seeking to ensure that it would continue regardless, 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. However, according to Strmiska and Sigurvinsson, the AFA had "planted seeds that would take strong root". As a replacement for the Assembly, Murray established the Asatru Alliance, which organised the eighth American Althing for Arizona in June 1988.
In 1986–87, McNallen worked as a peace officer in Stephens County Texas sheriff's office jail and Sheila kept books for an oil company. In 1986, he and Sheila moved to the semi-deserted mining town of Forest in the mountains of California, and there he earned teaching credentials before teaching science and mathematics at a junior high school for six years. During his summer vacations he travelled abroad, during which he met with guerrilla groups active in various parts of the world, writing articles about them for magazines like Soldier of Fortune. He later related that this experience convinced him of the need for ethnonationalism and ethnic separatism across the world. McNallen also joined the U.S. National Guard and was called up during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
Return to Heathenry: 1994–2016