Asatru Folk Assembly - February 01, 2021


Focus on the Folk part 3 October 2007

Topics
networking professional people
Hosted by
Steve McNallen
Mentioned
Boy Scout Osatru McNeil Asatru
AFA Great Northwest Freyfaxi 2014 Twelve Days of Yule Day 10 December 2008

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

145.62

Word count

1,267

Sentence count

73

Harmful content

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I sit down with the founder of Pagan Pride, Stephan McNeil, to talk about the need for a new home base for Asatru. We talk about how to attract new members, what to do about it, and who to target.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I think networking is important. If you've been given the gift of speech, if you've been
00:00:10.280 given the gift of being able to teach others, then take advantage of your gifts. Hold workshops.
00:00:20.680 We all have our daily nine to five that we all have to do, but we also need to pay service
00:00:26.860 to the gods and the goddesses and the folk.
00:00:29.260 So if you have a library in your town
00:00:33.360 or a, I hate this, a New Age bookstore
00:00:37.480 where other like-minded, open-minded individuals
00:00:43.020 will come and attend, hold a workshop.
00:00:47.460 Get literature from, if you belong to an organization,
00:00:51.680 take literature.
00:00:52.380 Take literature on Osatru itself.
00:00:55.160 Have a number of books available so that people can come there and say, how's this book?
00:01:00.660 Or is this the book that I should start out with?
00:01:03.100 Be teachers.
00:01:04.540 And we've got to all be AsaTru Ambassadors.
00:01:08.360 And by doing so, we will spread this religion of ours and let people know that we're out there.
00:01:13.760 But it's important.
00:01:14.640 It goes back to networking.
00:01:16.100 We have the ability now.
00:01:17.200 We've got the tools to network.
00:01:18.800 And by networking, we can bring people to us. 0.99
00:01:22.780 And we've got to stop searching in places like Pagan Pride days for Osachruers. 0.95
00:01:36.360 Because, this is my own opinion, I'm going to preface it with that, 1.00
00:01:42.820 but the people that you find at Pagan Pride have already found a path.
00:01:47.360 and to take them from that path into Asatru,
00:01:52.020 they may come over, but they're also going to be bringing a little of that baggage with them.
00:01:56.880 We want to attract people who have been looking for us,
00:02:01.080 didn't know what we were called, didn't know what the religion was called,
00:02:04.000 but they're sincere and they are looking for a solid family-based, community-based spiritual path
00:02:14.000 that reflects their ancestry and their own culture.
00:02:18.600 And we can do that.
00:02:20.440 We can do that by holding workshops and networking more.
00:02:25.300 And it's important that we do so.
00:02:27.740 Mr. McNeil, and let me kind of base it off of that answer.
00:02:33.100 Who should we target ourselves if we're going to try to bring in more people?
00:02:38.640 Who should we target, do you think?
00:02:40.220 I think we should target people who are family friendly, people who understand the importance
00:02:50.260 of having family and transmitting on our culture and our way into the future. That doesn't
00:02:58.460 necessarily mean that everyone's got to personally have children, but they need to be supportive
00:03:02.140 of those who do we need to attract people who understand the importance of tradition people
00:03:10.700 who do not dismiss the past and thereby who do not automatically dismiss the ancestors which of
00:03:16.460 course is the the trend in modern life you know the ancestors don't matter the ancestors don't
00:03:21.740 sell enough refrigerators the ancestors are not marketable we need to attract people of intelligence
00:03:29.660 people who are open-minded we need to attract people who essentially share
00:03:37.700 many of the better values of our Christian neighbors as you ride into
00:03:44.300 this place where we are today you see a series of signs and these are the the
00:03:50.120 all the the principles that lie behind being a Boy Scout you find
00:03:54.340 trustworthiness and loyalty and all of these list of virtues not entirely unlike our own nine noble
00:04:02.740 virtues a couple of differences i'd tweak a couple of those yeah obedience yeah we would need to
00:04:09.760 stress i think the difference between obedience and duty yeah but you know these are quote
00:04:17.000 american values these are what americans used to believe before we became cynical overly urbanized
00:04:24.320 atomized cut off from each other these still resonate I think strongly in in
00:04:32.000 the hearts of our people we need to nourish this to cultivate this and
00:04:39.260 there's a lot of those people out there people who are burned by the way that
00:04:43.280 life is going the way the the global culture is developing and who wants
00:04:47.560 something with roots with foundations and we've got it what do you think who
00:04:52.880 should we target? I think that traditionalists would be the word that comes to my mind that's
00:05:00.280 one of the least loaded in modern political speech and such. People who are looking for
00:05:04.160 something deeply rooted. People who are looking for an alternative to the worship of convenience
00:05:10.680 and profit that seems to be the primary motivation of your average middle American. Someone who does
00:05:18.240 respect their family and their ancestors and the ancestors of this country and our culture
00:05:22.720 as a greater forefathers. I don't know what group we would find those in, but I agree that a lot of
00:05:34.360 the best Christians I've known exemplify a lot of the same values and things they're looking for
00:05:43.160 As us. The best people I know of any faith, of any economic sector or any location, I think, are looking for something deeply rooted and something that has a tradition that they can hook into.
00:05:57.080 And I think those are the people that we need to attract.
00:05:59.540 Stephan, what do you think?
00:06:00.860 Well, when I first got into Asatru, it was always stressed to me that Asatru was the blue-collar man's religion.
00:06:07.120 that it was the carpenter and the plumber
00:06:11.060 and the guy that drove the garbage truck.
00:06:14.500 And it was really, really, it was emphasized to me
00:06:18.140 over and over and over again.
00:06:20.060 Well, I'm a professional stand-up comedian.
00:06:22.720 And I was thinking, wait a minute, how does that apply to me?
00:06:25.520 I'm not blue-collar, but I'm a worker.
00:06:29.860 I'm working, I'm doing what I do.
00:06:32.240 And I think that whole blue-collar thing stemmed from the fact that it was more rural people who were beginning to follow Osage War.
00:06:44.640 But now that's changed, and I think that we should be seeking out professional people, lawyers, doctors, college students, retirees.
00:06:54.400 I talk to elderly people every day, and they'll say, oh, what does that pendant mean?
00:07:01.660 And I'll tell them about that, they go, I've never heard of that.
00:07:04.020 And they're truly, sincerely interested in this.
00:07:07.780 Because I found that as we get older, you have a tendency, you've perhaps raised your children,
00:07:17.000 you've had a big taste of life, you've got a lot of life experience underneath you,
00:07:21.960 and now you're beginning to look more within yourself.
00:07:26.720 You go spiritually deeper than you did in your 50s.
00:07:31.440 You're going to go spiritually deeper than you did when you were in your 20s.
00:07:34.900 And things are going to have more meaning to you.
00:07:37.700 So the retirement community is a place where we need to also put our efforts.
00:07:44.200 But we need to have professional people.
00:07:47.140 We need people with money.
00:07:48.840 We need people with money who are saying, you know what?
00:07:51.600 I've got enough money to fund a community center or an information center on Ossetru.
00:07:55.760 I've got the money and the land to build a Hoff, to build a temple, because that's what we need.
00:08:02.580 Hoffs and temples and buildings give us credibility.
00:08:06.820 They make us valid, because people can say, wow, that's a neat building.
00:08:11.120 I mean, I was a Mormon.
00:08:13.200 When I go up to Oregon, I see the Mormon temple as I drive by on the freeway.
00:08:17.960 It's impressive. It is impressive.
00:08:21.020 There's a lot of marble. There's a lot of gold.
00:08:23.920 There's a lot of beautiful landscape lawn and everything.
00:08:28.120 And we need that.
00:08:30.160 We really need that.
00:08:31.960 We need to have temples and stuff.
00:08:34.680 And so by attracting professional people who are making money,
00:08:38.460 these are the things that we can attract to us and gain,
00:08:40.820 and we'll get those things.