Large number of Australians list 'Jedi' as their religion
On Aug. 9, millions of Australians will be filling out forms to complete the 17th national Census of Population and Housing, which the Australian Bureau of Statistics dubbed as the "country's largest and most significant online event."
The census will also ask Australians about their religious affiliation. In recent years, people have put Jedi as their religion.
In the 2011 Australian census, 64,390 put "Jedi" as their religion, up from 58,053 in 2006, putting them behind Sikhs and Seventh Day Adventists, the Brisbane Times reported.
The Jedi phenomenon started in 2001 when an email campaign claimed that the Australian government would recognise it as a religion if 8,000 people wrote it on the census.
Kylie Sturgess, president of the Atheist Foundation of Australia, is campaigning for Australians not to make fun of the census by writing Jedi.
Sturgess said when people mark the "other" box and write "Jedi," it is counted as "not defined" and not "no religion" like atheists.
"People shouldn't waste their answer," she said. "Answering the religion question thoughtfully and honestly matters because it benefits all Australians when decisions on how to spend taxpayer dollars are made on sound data that accurately reflects modern-day Australia."
In the 2011 census, there were 13,150,673 Australians of the 21,507,719 or 61 percent who said they are Christians. A total of 4.76 million marked "no religion" while Islam had 476,291.
Posters urging people to mark the "no religion" box say, "If old religious men in robes do not represent you, don't mask yourself as 'Jedi'."
"Some people put down Jedi as a snub to the government, saying, 'You can't tell me what to do.'" said Star Wars fan Chris Brennan from Melbourne. "But others put it down as a serious commitment."
He said there are "many genuine followers of the Jedi way and they're not all nut jobs and ferals."
Brennan said the Jedi belief has views like "all life is sacred" and "be kind to others."
In the United States, there is the Temple of the Jedi Order, which says that "the Jedi here are real people that live or lived their lives according to the principles of Jediism, the real Jedi religion or philosophy."
