White supremacists in U.S. inspired by ancient Nordic religion

White supremacist worldview is not popular among heathen religions like Odinism, but the number of attacks carried out by racist, domestic far-right terrorists in the last two decades is not negligible (in fact, far-right terrorists carried out four times more attacks in the United States since 1990 than Islamist jihadists, though more Americans were killed as a result of jihadist attacks). Experts warn that these groups are thriving in 2017’s divided America.

The Odinists, and other far-right nationalists, share a feeling of insecurity. “Races just don’t really mix well, especially if whites are the minority among other racial groups – if we’re under attack or we’re threatened. It just doesn’t ever work in our favor,” said Brandon Lashbrook, 34, an Odinist from Downtown Centralia, Illinois, who first attended a Ku Klux Klan rally when he was eight. “We have to be prepared to fight. We need to study martial arts, weight train. We need to be prepared and unified, and ready to defend ourselves,” he added.

Lowell Smith, a former probation officer who worked with white supremacists across the United States for fifteen years, said law enforcement should prioritize any belief system, conventional or obscure, which motivates people to consider killing innocent civilians. These groups are also dangerous to law enforcement officers. According to a 2015 poll of law enforcement officers from all over the country, U.S. government agencies “consider anti-government violent extremists, not radicalized Muslims, to be the most severe threat of political violence they face.”

Some of the terrorists may not even be committed to the religion they use as cover to kill people. Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., who pledged himself to Odin in his self-published 1999 autobiography, was hardly known as a practicing Odinist. But on 13 April 2014, after about one month of disappearance, he went on rampage intending to kill as many Jews as possible. He killed three people at two Kansas Jewish community centers. As it turned out, his victims were non-Jewish employees at the center and he told the court “I wanted to kill Jews, not people.”

Terrorism experts say that singling out one religion as the source of terrorism is a mistake. Talking about the threat of homegrown Odonist terrorists, Daryl Johnson, who spent six years as the senior domestic terrorism analyst at the Department of Homeland Security, said: “Extremists tend to hijack these religions and these beliefs and adopt them into their worldview and use them for justification for carrying out violent attacks,” he said.