As someone who studies religion and has taught a class on the anthropology of religion for 40 years, I have to say that Nazis/Neo-Nazis can be aligned with Christianity as well. I've watched the rise of Norse Paganism for 30 years, online and off (it used to be a playful, non-racist kind of thing, then forums like Skadi came online - and then it became something much more sinister, and in my view, corrupt). It was not associated with the more recent rise of white supremacism (sometimes called "nationalism" but I think that's just their propaganda wing that says that).
OTOH, Nordic mythology has a lot of violence in it. But then, so does the Bible. And that's because the world in which those ancient people lived had war and some violence (which appears at the same time that farming appears - because farmers have to stay in one place to protect their crops and are subject to raids from non-farmers - and to warfare over land resources). Most anthropologists say there's no evidence of war in the archaeological record (raiding - yes, war, no) until about 6000 years ago (and it's in Denmark). There are probably older pieces of evidence, but that's what's in the standard textbooks (like Brian Fagan's Peoples of the World and related prehistories) says 6000BP for sure. The "Norse paganism" practiced by some Americans today is derived mainly from Viking sources. But the Vikings did not represent all of Scandinavia and in fact, the word "Viking" is closer to the English word "private" than to "Scandinavian." For a run down of English piracy, one can read the excellent biography of Sir Francis Drake (who gave up being a slaver and a pirate to do something more honorable), by Laurence Bergreen (In Search of a Kingdom).
Yes, there are Neo-Nazi groups in the US (and most other Western nations). And some of them believe that they have adopted Nordic beliefs, although none of those groups has been studied well enough to know exactly what that means.
"Pagan" is a word used in English, mostly by Christians, to denote non-Christians whose beliefs date back to before 30 AD or thereabouts. The main criteria, besides that, seems to be that the "pagans" didn't have a book to go by (and still don't). Other rubrics for that word (when not used by pagans to denote themselves, which is different) is that the people aren't in touch with any "true" religion. IOW, it's meant to indicate that the pagans are "less than" the person who is calling them that.
Here's a short abstract of the relationship between punk music, Norse mythology and Neo-Nazi beliefs in European youth:
Abstract This article explores the design strategies of four record labels associated with the growth of an explicitly far-right sub-genre of punk in the United Kingdom between 1979 and the early 2000s: Rock-O-Rama Records, White Noise Records, Rebelles Européens and ISD Records. While...
intellectdiscover.com
There are several other studies of actual Neo-Nazi Norse beliefs and their intersections and more are coming. It's an active area of study, almost always among youth, almost always related to music and sometimes to video games as well. I can find article after article about young people and their recruitment into Neo-Nazism, but none about adults in the Midwest.
This chapter looks at how the Far Right appeals to the imagination of young people by leveraging the fantasy genre in popular culture. Thus, the ordinary young white man is invited to become a hero fighting for his people and his land. Aryan and Viking warrior myths...
link.springer.com
However, there's plenty of research into these ideologies outside the Midwest. This is from an entire book:
nmh.brage.unit.no
Breivik is the example in that chapter. Here's a list of Neo-Nazi groups in Indiana:
Hate groups currently residing in the state of Indiana
databases.courier-journal.com
There are similar data for most states And as you can see from the above list, there is at least one group in Indiana that's neo-Pagan.
I follow Willa Appel's excellent research on cults for my own definition of a cult. And one of the criteria is that cult beliefs are embraced by cultists who are NOT raised in the belief system (the newness of it and lack of elders and lack of traditions is one reason we all it a cult and not a religion. Nearly all religions start as cults - but very, very few survive the death of the original cult leader/founder/person of worship. Cults spring up all over the world, all the time and many of them are, from my POV, truly...crazy (sorry to drop my anthropological voice, just giving personal opinion there). They arise in both literate and non-literate populations. We know that previous membership in a strict organized religion makes a young person more vulnerable to joining a cult (see Willa Appel's
Cults in America: Programmed for Paradise) for that data. Many of you would find it interesting reading.
I don't have any data or evidence of any contemporary American cult performing human sacrifice, though I'll keep looking. To find out more about Christian Neo-Nazis in America (there's a lot of research and journalism - and autobiography), just google that term. Here's an excellent full article on the
role of Christianity in the rise of the actual Nazi movement:
Official endorsement of Christianity by the Nazi Party came in around 1920:
The
Nazi Party Programme of 1920 guaranteed freedom for all religious denominations which were not hostile to the State and it also endorsed
Positive Christianity in order to combat "the Jewish-materialist spirit"
^
en.wikipedia.org
So, for someone to become a White Supremacist Nationalist Norse Believer, I am assuming that Indiana members were raised in and around Christianity and (if such a movement exists), they are rejecting Christianity in favor of an ancient Nordic belief system (or an attempt at it, anyway - very hard for people without the tradition to successfully reinvent it, I know of no cases of that).
They are therefore rejecting the participation of non-White people in the State and embracing the religion they believe is most associated with the blond-haired and blue-eyed.
Oddly, some of the Neo-Nazis I've interviewed do not have blond hair or blue eyes, but claim that at least one parent did. Further, almost none of them can show that they descended from any Nordic culture (so it's cultural appropriation). However, in the Midwest, there are way more Nordic-descended people (as a percentage) than here in the West, which is where I do my research. OTOH, I have interviewed several incarcerated neo-Nazis who are plainly not considered "white" by other members of the same viewpoint (although at least one had gained a certain amount of acceptance by them - these beliefs are neither consistent nor rational, obviously).
I think the Norse pagan beliefs used in the U.S. are coming from musical trends, podcasts (by Americans), podcasts on Norse myth, popular books/novels (in English, mostly published in the U.S. but some from U.K.) I personally have never met a Norse Neo-Pagan who could read any Scandinavian language or who had read the sources for the mythology (which include archaeological finds) personally. I've also never met one who has studied the archaeological evidence of Norse religion.
So it's only "coming from Europe" in the sense that many Americans "came from Europe." I can't see a lot of differences between the Scandinavian ritual/religious system and that of many other cultures (many of which are non-European). The best-studied religions of human sacrifice are, IMO, the Aztecs and the Greeks (yes, the Greeks used human sacrifice to placate the gods - and so did the people of Crete; it's a fascinating topic and these practices
do not involve random selection of victims, at all). As with certain funerary customs of India (still in practice, but rare) the victims were sometimes self-chosen. This post is long enough already, too much to go into.
OTOH, Neo-Nazism exists in comtemporary Nordic nations (but even after a brief research stint in Norway, I could find no one in Norway who was "pagan" nor of the Norse religion. I met people who loved their own mythology and detested the burning of churches (which they viewed as punk/metal and not Nazi or Norse), but I never met anyone who practice Ancient Norse religion (some people of course were syncretic - they had borrowed elements of the Old Religion and incorporated it into either their own religion or philosophy - they were not out practicing made up Norse rituals).
At any rate, nearly all of us have ancestors whose cultures/members "practiced human sacrifice" of some kind - but Nordic human sacrifice was a feature of funeral rituals for important people. It did not involve outsiders and anyone who thinks they are practicing ancient Nordic religion by using or
thinking about human sacrifice outside that specific ritual context is terribly misled (and grandiose/out of touch with reality enough that they need to be incarcerated/receiving heavy duty psychiatric care).
White nationalist Breivik was not religious at all, as far as I can tell. If it is true that RA is a practicing Odinist, then if I were advising his defense, and if Indiana law allows, he should be evaluated for schizophrenia and plead not guilty by reason of insanity. Problem with that is, of course, is that he's been functioning normally as a non-schizophrenic (so far as we know) all his adult life.
Opinion:
If RA was part of a cult movement, I suppose he could attempt a plea bargain by turning in all his cronies (but surely, he'd fear death inside prison if he did so - his defense is actually poising him in a manner that could turn out very badly when it 1) doesn't convince a jury and 2) makes the white supremacists in prison hate him for blabbing.
www.forbes.com
www.courttv.com
I wouldn't be surprised if the defense team is not reprimanded for this.
