Recognised by One Government, and a Movement Split Over Who Belongs

Iceland formally recognised Asatru, the modern revival of Norse and Germanic religion whose midwinter Blot this entry describes, as an official state-registered religion in 1973, entitling it to the same tax-funding mechanism available to other recognised faiths, and the Icelandic Asatru association subsequently built Hofid, the country's first purpose-built pagan temple in around a thousand years, with construction beginning in the 2010s, a level of formal civic standing few modern Pagan movements anywhere have achieved.

Heathenry has also had to reckon publicly with attempts by racist and white nationalist groups to claim Norse religious symbolism for their own ideology, a use most major Heathen organisations explicitly and repeatedly reject; a number of prominent Heathen groups internationally have issued formal public statements, including a widely circulated declaration rejecting folkish and racist interpretations of the religion, insisting that devotion to the old Norse gods carries no implication about ancestry or ethnicity, while a smaller number of self-described folkish organisations continue to hold and defend an ethnicity-based view of who may properly practise the religion, making the boundary between inclusive and folkish Heathenry one of the clearest and most actively contested divisions within the modern movement.