In December, 1996, Robert Wright wrote a piece in Time magazine for a cover story titled Jesus Online. His article wasn't about Christianity though. It was called Can Thor Make A Comeback? Obscure Religions -- Half Forgotten Or Half Invented -- Are Flourishing On The Web.

NOTE: you need a paid subscription to access the full text on the Time site. As of 10 minutes ago, I'm a paid subscriber. If you're not, the text and graphic links above will give you only a bit of the story. If you're a Highbeam Research subscriber, you get Time plus another 2,999 publications and documents. I didn't mean for this to be an advertisement, only an explanation. So shoot me already.

"The point here," Wright wrote, "is not that a major Asatru comeback is in the cards. Thor's best days are almost certainly behind him (though no fewer than 12 Asatru Websites are listed in the Yahoo! Web-indexing service)."

Granted, that article was written nine years ago, but today Yahoo lists 154,000 hits for Asatru, and Google lists 206,000. Which gives us to believe that, comeback or not, it's sure growing -- whatever the hell it is. Nine years ago, even nine months ago, I'd never heard the term. Something closer to nine days ago, I began to get a clue. It seems that Asatru has a lot to do with Norse gods and Icelandic Eddas and the good old ways of those good old boys from the frozen wastes of (stop me if you've heard this before) Northern Europe. Roughly speaking. Which is appropriate, as they were all rough speakers themselves back in those fabled times of yore. It is thought, by those who practice what they imagine to have been the old pre-Christian religion of Asatru, that its progenitors had a certain atavistic vitality, uncomplicated by a lot of wasteful abstract ideation. Warring on weaker tribes, wenching in the mead halls -- it was a simpler life, even if its simplicity and closer proximity to nature also meant closer proximity to an early grave. But no matter. It was a warrior culture. All brave lads and true. Sorta like Led Zeppelin. And lasses who lived to serve their brawny men and feed them and love them till the goats came home. Yeah, I can see the appeal.

Especially, perhaps, in contrast to that wimpy Jesus some Time art director took as the demographic average of American opinions as to what the Son of God must have looked like in his prime. To me, it looks as if he might have taken one too many ludes. Looks like the dude's about to nod. Whether or not that image bears any resemblance to the historical Christ, demographics, as we know, never lie. If the Time editors did their homework -- and you can bet they did -- this is how traditional America envisions the soul of Christianity.

However, another large and growing part of America these days is feeling a bit more feisty, a bit less turn the other cheekish, a bit more inclined to... well hey, you saw the shots coming out of Abu Ghraib... call it sado-masochismo -- with a down-home heaping helping of xenophobic racism thrown in for good measure. Yeah sure, there are gentle throwback New Age hippies prancing around Maypoles and plaiting flowers into their braids and calling themselves pagans. But there's an altogether other camp of pagans out there that, let's just say, you really wouldn't want to run into on a moonless night in some militia infested Federal forest preserve.

That's just my own jaundiced view, of course. So let's hear from a professional for a change. This passage takes us -- eventually -- back to my musings above, but it does so via certain highly twisted permutations of American Christianity itself.

The Ku Klux Klan is but one of a staggering variety of racist organizations that compete and at times cooperate with one another within a broader white supremacy movement. Many of these organizations are loosely linked by their adherence to Christian Identity theology. As Blee (1998) describes it, "Christian Identity is a quasi-theological network of between two and three hundred churches across the nation linked by Christian Identity Family Bible Camps and radio shows that preach that Anglo-Saxons are the lost tribe of Israel and the Jews and African Americans and other people of color are inferiors sent to earth as a scourge from God." According to this belief system, Eve was impregnated with two seeds. Cain and the Jews are believed to be the product of a seed planted by Satan, while members of the "white" race are descendants of Abel, who was born of Adam's seed. Nonwhites, while they are not believed to be direct descendants of Satan, are viewed with disdain and considered to be less than human (Southern Poverty Law Center 1998).

Not unlike many mainstream conservative religious belief systems in the United States, Identity Theology constructs an absolute dichotomy of good and evil and promotes a belief in absolute moral standards. Unlike mainstream religions, however, evil is presumed to be located within individuals based on their ascribed characteristics. Identity theology constructs a violent tension between the presumed descendants of Cain and Abel, and it legitimates even the most violent actions that may be directed toward Jews and toward racial and ethnic minority group members.

In recent years new radical religious belief systems have gained strength within the white supremacy movement, challenging the privileged position of Identity Theology among American racist organizations. Most notable among these are the Church of the Creator (COTC), also called "Creativity," and racist adaptations of the Norse pagan religion Odinism and its offshoot Asatru. Like Identity Theology, COTC and racist pagan religions demonize Jews and racial and ethnic minorities, while encouraging followers to prepare for a race war. They are critical of Identity Theology's ties to Christianity, however, and have a close affinity with Nazism.

from: Structured Ignorance and Organized Racism in the United States
by Rory McVeigh
source: Social Forces, 1 March 2004.
via: HighBeam Research

To recap and retreat to McDonald's for a very early breakfast before the crosses burst into flames on my front lawn: those 12 Asatru websites Time magazine found on Yahoo in 1996 have grown to 206,000 mentions as reported by google today. Run another google search for Asatru Nazi, and the intersection of the two terms yields nearly a thousand page references. Granted, many are arguing that Odinism and Asatru bear no relationship to Nazi racism, but methinks that's a whole lotta ladies protesting way too much. Now search once more for +"Anglo-Celtic" +(racism | racist) and you'll get 15,400 hits.

Among them is another piece from the Souther Poverty Law Center, titled A League of Their Own. The sub-slug reads: "The League of the South, a group at the center of the neo-Confederate movement, says it's not racist, but the evidence shows otherwise." Here are some verbatim clips by and about J. Michael Hill, founder and president of the League.

• [Hill] says people other than white Christians would be allowed to live in his South, but only if they bow to "the cultural dominance of the Anglo-Celtic people and their institutions."
• [The League of the South] has steadily grown more powerful, to the point that it is now at the nexus of the neo-Confederate movement. It's ideas about the "Anglo-Celtic" nature of the South are now nearly universally accepted by pro-South groups...
• "The destruction of states rights in the South," Hill wrote in 1998, "was the first necessity leading to forced policies undermining the cultural dominance of the Anglo-Celtic people and its institutions."

The question that keeps turning around in my mind is what THAT Anglo-Celtic has to do with THIS Anglo-Celtic? I mean it must be coincidence, right? But you know what them crypto-mystical New Age white folks always like to say: As Above, So Below.