What Happened to Stephen McNallen?

In 1984 when I was really just getting my start in American Asatru I encounter a name in a Wiccan publication, Stephan McNallen and the Asatru Free Assembly. Back then before the internet, social media, and all this we found out about things through magazines, newspapers, the radio, and television. In the case of “new age religions” it was a magazine or word of mouth if you were luck enough to live near some “freaky witch shop”. MCNallen use to advertise in Soldier of Fortune magazine, being a 14-year-old in the 1980s it is possible I saw the add hee. McNallen was running the Asatru Free Assemble so I sent a letter, got a membership form and I joined. It was all pretty low budget. I think I receive a few copies of a newsletter over the two years I was a member, but not much else. Then POOF! it was gone. 1in 1986 the Asatru Free Assemble split becoming the Asatru Alliance and The Ring of Troth. In 1987 I found The Ring of Troth and joined up with them. Again, I received a few newsletters and some membership papers, not much else. These were the days before the internet!

Many years would go by where I was pretty much on my own in the Asatru world. Eventually I met some people and we had our own little group. Sometime in the mid to late 1990s McNallen reemerged with the Asatru Folk Assembly and I got wind of all that. I took my time and observed before getting a membership, which I held for years to come before parting ways once again with the AFA.

McNallen was a major player in the promotion of Asatru, we all knew that. He produced books, websites, YouTube videos, and for years was everywhere on the internet promoting Asatru. By the early 2000s the AFA and McNallen were on the forefront of Asatru and they opened the first true heathen temple in the United States. I have to say I was impressed.

Back in the 1980s I do not think may of us were really paying attention. McNalllen was promoting his world view of Germanic ancestry and folkish system. However, he did this in a way that seemed clean and not racist. Back then I was fighting Neo-Nazi skinheads in the punk clubs I hung out in. That shit just wasn’t cool. Yet, here I was reading McNallen’s writing and part of his organization. I was completely unaware of McNallen’ metagenetics nonsense and to be quite honest I was until just last year. Some how I overlooked the most important t point, metagenetics.

Metagenetics claims culture is passed on genetically within specific groups of people. The idea is that if you are not Germanic, you have no right, claim, etc. “our” Gods. That is Nazi master race shit!!! How did we all miss that? I’ll tell you how. All the new age book shops carried the books on the religion, but not the neo-Nazi politics being whitewashed outside those Wiccan shops. Most of us were just unaware of it, and I am ashamed to say I was too.

McNallen is a very charismatic character. He seems to have the power to have us overlook the white power undertones and accept them. So, I say what happened to Stephen McNallen? Nothing. He is a racist from Texas who snowballed us all. He convinced us that he was not racists, while promoting neo-Nazi or as we call it today “white nationalist” politics behind the scenes. 

I was a big supporter of McNallen, but over the past few years his politics and white nationalist ideas became more prominent and vocal I had to part ways with McNallen, the AFA, and any organization that McNallen was associated with. As heathens we should outlaw McNallan and in a sense we have. Declaration 127 did just that to the Asatru Folk Assembly and essentially McNallen.

hvars þú böl kannt kveðu þat bölvi at ok gefat þínum fjándum frið
“When you see misdeeds, speak out against them, and give your enemies no frið”
Hávamál 127