What Everyone Missed About the Wolves of Vinland
It's actually another story about the decline of Anglicanism
The thing about Norse neopaganism is that it has no history in America. The first Norwegians in the New World, if you read the Saga of the Vinlanders, had accepted baptism, and thus, as a matter of Roman jurisdiction, North America was first the territory of the Archbishop of Hamburg.
In Kevin Starr’s account in Continental Ambitions, they wore the faith somewhat flexibly. They were reluctant to give up their concubines, for instance. I get that.
But there can be a sort of backsliding, too. In much the same way that the Jews today, having left the comforts of Northern Europe, are degenerating into just another fanatical Levantine hill tribe, there are gentiles for whom pagan traditions hold some appeal.
This pagan cult in Lynchburg occupied an inordinate amount of attention in the period leading up to the rise of Trump. Tons of reporters did stories about it.
The leader, whose work has some influence in Europe too, is Paul Waggener, whom the Lakewood shooter Lyndon McLeod seems to have been a fan of. One funny thing about this is Waggener isn’t a Scandinavian name, it’s an Anglicization of a German name. He has the manner of a pastor’s kid, because he is one.
This story calls to mind the line from the prophet Jeremiah, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” They see the religion their families have practiced for generations collapsing, and they go do something else. It’s not always better.
Waggener’s father is a refugee from the collapse of the Anglican Communion, this is what everybody missed. Father Alban Waggener was a curate at St. Paul’s K Street, regarded as the home of Anglo-Catholicism in DC.
Fr. Waggener left the Episcopal Church in the 1980s, part of a wave that saw the ordination of women as impossible, an issue which is now being refought in continuing Anglican jurisdictions. There have been tremendous consequences to indulging these women’s desire to play dress-up in this way. Drag king story hour, you might say. The fact is a lot of the men don’t find it very credible, though Episcopalians are famously good at holding their tongues.
And if you think cults led by men are bad, you should see the cults led by women. In NXIVM, for instance, it seems like Keith Raniere was basically a front, perfectly happy to preach his guru bushwa as long as his balls were empty, but the real mover was a Bronfman—famously a Jewish mafia family—and it was the women who were branding each other in the name of empowerment.
Aaron Bushnell also came from an Anglican-style cult run by women. If I had to be around these people I’d have lit myself on fire long before he did. The Community of Jesus on Cape Cod famously has good music, but the group is bad news. It was founded by Episcopal laywomen who wanted to be abbesses or something. They get good press from the Church Times in the UK and, curiously, the Jesuit America.
The Episcopal Church—and for that matter the Church of England, too—has been testing the proposition that you can be all style and no substance, which is to say deeply heterodox but nice to look at. The results speak for themselves, more loudly today than back then. It’s basically chaos, the whole thing hasn’t held together, and there are all these fragments, shards all over the place, many of them messed up in their own ways. But lots of people were forced to make difficult choices.
Fr. Waggener was ordained an Orthodox priest in 2006—in practice the Orthodox do not regard Anglican orders as valid, either—and now leads a Western-Rite community in the Antiochian jurisdiction, there in Lynchburg.
Both the father and the son’s activities are sort of a LARP, if you ask me. From what I understand these Western-Rite communities are very loosely regulated, with little oversight from the honchos in Damascus. The son’s groups are all on Telegram, which probably has a Russian backdoor. If there are counterintelligence risks at the Vatican—and there are, as everyone knows—this is in no way better.
From a certain angle of vision it has the quality of a Russian biker gang, and that may not be a coincidence. I have very little time for it, but be that as it may, this sort of stuff, in terms of its cost to souls, has probably done less damage than the apostasy of the Episcopal Church, or even in Lynchburg itself, the silliness of Falwell-ism.
Moreover, a refugee Anglican priest putting himself in the jurisdiction of an Orthodox prelate in Damascus is considerably more absurd than ACNA’s origins with the Church of Nigeria. In the latter there’s at least sort of a common genealogy. I think most of these people are still avoiding the inevitable, which is that it’s Rome or bust.
There is a way Christianity in the English-speaking world makes a virtue out of necessity, or even in some cases a virtue out of catastrophe. Everybody knows these lines, with the inevitable recourse to the phrase “Celtic Christianity.” Virginia lacked a bishop until after the revolution, and for the most part the Virginians didn’t want one. In general this stuff underrates the benefits of being normal and well-governed.