Else Christensen - Criticisms

Criticisms

Critics have claimed that Christensen advocated National Socialism, however, it can be clearly seen from her own writings that she actually advocated the Anarcho-syndicalism of her youth. She idealized a decentralized folkish communalism with a heavy emphasis on race, ecological awareness and advocated a pagan back to the land movement.

Christensen's Odinist Fellowship along with other racially-oriented groups which were active in the early days of Germanic Neopaganism contributed to the rise of what has been called "Aryan revolutionary paganism" in the United States and the subsequent infusion of the racist right with pagan religion.

This is distinctly different from the Folkish beliefs of most Germanic Neo-Pagans who distinctly eschew affiliations with Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists, although sometimes the lines are blurred by terminology and semantics.

In a 1986 exchange with Ben Klassen, who was researching materials for his book A Revolution of Values Through Religion, Christensen wrote:

It is our destiny to be born in a historic period where the present cultural period is dying; it will still take maybe a couple of more centuries before the final collapse. The new has not been born yet, but I hope and believe that we are today doing the groundwork for the foundation upon which the new basis for the religious/philosophical moral concepts will be built. They will have to be racial, discriminatory, self-assertive, proud.

Klassen, then dismissed Christensen and Odinism as incompatible and counter-productive to the white supremacist cause and his anti-Christian agenda, and stated:

A religion that failed to withstand the Jewish-Christian onslaught a thousand years ago cannot reasonably be expected to roll it back now, under conditions a thousand times more adverse.

After her time in prison, Christensen was adamant about not infusing politics or race with Odinism. The policies of the newly revived Odinist Fellowship and the tone of her writings were distinctly apolitical and non-racially oriented.