Some rabbit trails bring us back to a place we have already visited, but they do not always bring us back for the same reason. Sometimes the old gate is still standing, but something has changed on the other side.
Unplugged Pagan has already spent considerable time with Declaration 127. We have looked at its origins, its relationship to Hávamál 127, its opposition to folkism, its expansion into Declaration 127 2.0, and what its teaching about frith means when the problem is not a stranger outside the hall but someone already sitting near the fire. Those earlier posts asked where the line should be drawn and why silence should not be confused with peace.
This is not another walk through the same history. The rabbit has moved past the sign at the gate and is now looking at what stands behind it. Declaration 127 helped Inclusive Heathens identify what they would no longer tolerate, but a community cannot live forever on a list of things it opposes. Once the gate has been built, someone still has to build the village.
The Gate Was Necessary
The original Declaration 127 appeared in 2016 as a direct response to the Ásatrú Folk Assembly and its exclusionary claims about race, sexuality and gender. Its purpose was narrow but important: the signatories would not promote, associate with or conduct business with the AFA while those policies remained in place. They would not offer the silent approval of frið to people using Heathen traditions to justify prejudice.
That first declaration was a gate. It said that not every ideology using Heathen names, symbols and gods would automatically receive recognition as an equally legitimate form of Heathenry. It rejected the idea that hospitality required giving racial exclusion an honoured seat in the hall.
Declaration 127 2.0 widened that gate in 2021. Instead of concentrating on one named organization, it addressed discrimination more broadly and included age, ability, health, race, ethnicity, ancestry, veteran status, gender, gender identity, sexuality and socioeconomic class. The Declaration of Deeds, which emerged around the same period, added a particularly Heathen answer: the circumstances of birth do not establish a person’s worth. Deeds do.
Those were necessary developments. A village with no gate cannot protect the people inside it. Hospitality without boundaries is not hospitality for long, because eventually the person who wants to control the hall will make everyone else unsafe. The gate matters, and the people who insisted on building it were not wrong.
But a gate is still not a village.
A gate cannot feed the hungry, teach the inexperienced, conduct ritual, preserve memory, care for the grieving or settle a dispute fairly. It can tell us who should not be permitted to poison the well, but it cannot by itself tell us how the well will be maintained, who will carry the water or what happens when the keeper of the well is the person causing harm.
When a Declaration Becomes a Rule
This is where something genuinely new has happened. In January 2026, The Troth adopted formal codes of conduct for its members and leaders. These standards prohibit discrimination, harassment, retaliation, misuse of authority and institutional bullying. They also protect good-faith reporting and begin laying out reporting processes, safeguards against conflicts of interest, due process and avenues of appeal.
One provision deserves particular attention from an Unplugged Pagan perspective: leaders are specifically forbidden from weaponizing frith to pressure harmed people into silence, forced reconciliation or simply “being nice.”
That is a significant step beyond placing a declaration on a website. It recognizes that sacred language can itself be used as a tool of control. Words such as frith, hospitality, kinship, loyalty and community can describe worthy obligations, but they can also be turned against the injured person. A leader can invoke peace while protecting the person who broke it. A community can demand reconciliation before truth has been established. A hall can preserve its reputation by convincing the wounded person that speaking publicly would be the greater betrayal.
Unplugged Pagan has called that false peace. The Troth has now given that problem an organizational name and placed it inside a leadership standard. Frith is not protected by silencing the person who reports harm. Frith was already damaged by the act that made the report necessary.
This is the movement from moral language to accountable structure. A declaration says, “We oppose harm.” A code of conduct asks what happens when harm occurs, who receives the complaint, what protects the complainant from retaliation, how evidence is considered, how conflicts of interest are handled and whether the person making the decision can also be questioned.
That may sound administrative rather than spiritual, but healthy structure is one of the ways a community practices care. When authority is left informal and undefined, authority does not disappear. It simply becomes harder to see, harder to challenge and easier to misuse.
The People Carrying the Declaration
There is another lesson in what happened to Declaration 127 after version 2.0 was released. By the end of 2021, its volunteer committee had burned out and the original website eventually became inaccessible. The declaration survived in archives and through organizations that had signed it, but the structure responsible for maintaining the document, vetting signatories and answering questions largely disappeared.
This was not proof that the declaration had failed. It was proof that good intentions still require sustainable labour. Pagan communities repeatedly build important things on the backs of a few volunteers, celebrate the result and then quietly expect those same people to carry it indefinitely. When those people become exhausted, the disappearance of the work is often treated as a personal failure rather than the predictable result of an unsupported structure.
A village cannot be maintained by praising the firekeeper while leaving that person alone to gather every piece of wood.
In April 2024, responsibility for Declaration 127 and its associated assets was transferred to The Troth. The organization created a Declaration 127 subcommittee within its Community Relations Committee, giving the document a more permanent institutional home. That does not make The Troth the owner of Inclusive Heathenry, nor does it make the organization beyond criticism. It does, however, create identifiable responsibility for preserving the declaration and continuing its development.
In February 2026, The Troth announced an Inclusive Heathen coalition involving The Asatru Community, Fellowship of Fire and Ice, Heathens Against Hate and Urglaawe International. The coalition began working on a new shared position statement addressing the future of Declaration 127. A month later, The Troth reported that a new working draft was nearing release and would be opened to community comment and further revision.
At the time of writing, I have not found that draft publicly available. That means the work should not be treated as finished. The coalition is evidence of movement, not proof of completion. What ultimately matters will be the wording of the new document, the process used to revise it, the way signatories are vetted and what participating organizations are actually expected to do when those principles are violated.
Can Opposition Hold a Community Together?
A new Canadian academic study adds another important question. In his 2026 University of Ottawa thesis, Inclusive Heathenry: The Use of German Pagan Rhetoric in the Construction of a Progressive Contemporary Religion, David Gerald Joseph O’Reilly treats Declaration 127 as a turning point. It helped move Heathenry beyond the older language of “universalism” and toward an Inclusive Heathen identity that actively confronts racism and celebrates racial, sexual and gender diversity.
O’Reilly also raises a difficult criticism. Since 2016, much of Inclusive Heathenry’s energy has been directed toward separating itself from racist or otherwise harmful forms of Heathenry. That separation was necessary, but opposition can become an incomplete foundation. If the loudest shared conversation is always about who must be removed, the community may never develop a sufficiently strong answer to why everyone else should remain.
This does not mean anti-racism has become unnecessary or that the gate should be taken down. A village that forgets why the gate was built will eventually invite the same danger back inside. The question is whether defending the boundary has become the community’s entire identity.
People do not join a religious community only because it has expelled the correct people. They remain because they find ritual, meaning, relationship, obligation, teaching, care, memory and a place where their presence matters. They need more than safety from exclusion. They need belonging.
That distinction is important. Inclusion says that you may enter. Belonging says that your presence changes the shape of the village. Inclusion gives you a seat beside the fire. Belonging means someone notices when you are missing, listens when you speak, values what you contribute and helps carry you when your own strength fails.
What Must Be Built Inside the Gate?
If Declaration 127 marks the boundary, the next stage of Inclusive Heathenry must be measured by what it builds within that boundary. That includes rituals people can share without surrendering the diversity of their individual paths. It includes education grounded in responsible scholarship rather than fantasy history, clergy and community leaders trained to recognize harm, processes that allow complaints without retaliation, and archives that preserve community memory beyond the lifespan of one website or administrator.
It also includes ordinary forms of reciprocity. Visiting the sick. Helping someone through grief. Teaching a newcomer how to make an offering without making them feel foolish. Sharing food. Maintaining sacred places. Supporting people in recovery. Making gatherings accessible. Remembering the volunteers after the event posters come down. Allowing someone to leave without treating departure as betrayal.
None of those things is as dramatic as publishing a declaration. They are also the things that determine whether the declaration means anything.
The Declaration of Deeds gave us the simplest version of this lesson: we are known by what we do. An organization may describe itself as inclusive, but the word must eventually be visible in budgets, policies, accessibility, leadership choices, disciplinary processes, rituals and daily relationships. Otherwise, “inclusive” becomes another decorative label placed over the door.
The same is true of frith. If frith exists only when nobody complains, it is not frith. If hospitality exists only for people who never challenge authority, it is not hospitality. If belonging lasts only while a person remains useful, agreeable and silent, it is not belonging.
The Work After the Declaration
Our earlier UP posts concluded that declarations are not wards. They do not banish harm through correct wording, and they do not replace the courage required to act when the problem arrives at the hearth. The developments of 2026 do not invalidate that conclusion. They show what must come next.
The conduct codes give the boundary practical form. The coalition distributes some of the responsibility across multiple organizations. The proposed revision opens the possibility of community participation. The new scholarship asks whether Inclusive Heathenry can build a religious culture strong enough to offer more than opposition.
None of this guarantees success. Policies can be ignored. Committees can become closed circles. Reporting systems can protect institutions instead of people. Coalitions can produce statements nobody enforces. A beautiful village plan can remain rolled up on a table while the roof continues to leak.
Still, there is something important in recognizing that the gate was never supposed to be the finished work. Declaration 127 was a necessary refusal. It said that racial exclusion, white supremacy and other forms of dehumanizing discrimination would not be granted silence in the name of peace. The task now is to build a community in which that refusal is expressed through protection, accountability, shared practice and meaningful belonging.
A gate tells us where the village begins. Deeds tell us whether a village actually exists.
The rabbit has passed beneath the sign and found plans spread across a table under the trees. The walls are not complete, the new declaration has not yet arrived, and some of the old work still needs repair. But the question is finally moving in the right direction. It is no longer only, “What are we standing against?” It is becoming, “What are we responsible for building together?”
There goes the rabbit again. Godspeed.
Sources and Further Reading
- Unplugged Pagan — The Troth, Declaration 127, and the Line at the Hearth
- Unplugged Pagan — Declaration 127, Hávamál 127, and the Actual Hearth
- The Troth — Declaration 127
- The Troth — Membership and Leadership Codes of Conduct
- The Troth — Inclusive Heathen Coalition Announcement
- The Troth — Wintermoot 2026 Governance and Policy Outcomes
- David Gerald Joseph O’Reilly — Inclusive Heathenry: The Use of German Pagan Rhetoric in the Construction of a Progressive Contemporary Religion
