Jedi census phenomenon

• 1. Introduction

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  In the 2001 census for England and Wales, 390,127 people declared their religion to be Jedi. That figure put Jedi ahead of Sikhism, Judaism, and Buddhism in the country, making it the fourth-largest reported religion on the census form. Nobody, as far as anyone can tell, was prosecuted for it.

  The Jedi census phenomenon had its roots in a chain email that circulated before several national censuses held that year. It spread across New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom before those countries even put their forms in the post. The email carried a claim that turned out to be false: that any religion crossing a certain numerical threshold would earn official government recognition. The threshold was given as either 8,000 or 10,000, depending on which version of the email you received.

  What followed was one of the internet's earliest viral moments. Hundreds of thousands of people ticked a box, or wrote in a name, that their governments then had to figure out what to do with. Some officials were annoyed. Some were quietly amused. At least one pointed out that the joke had actually improved census participation. The questions this episode raises are still unresolved: what counts as a religion, what census data is actually for, and whether a joke answer can reveal something true about the person who writes it.

• 2. The Chain Email Origin

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  Before the 2001 censuses in New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom, a chain email began circulating with a specific promise: write Jedi on your census form, and if enough people do the same, the religion will receive official recognition. The threshold the email cited ranged between 8,000 and 10,000 respondents, depending on the version.

  That claim was an urban legend. No such rule existed in any of the three countries. But the email did not need to be accurate to be effective. It spread the idea through personal networks at a speed that was new at the time. The Australian website set up to promote the concept was visited over 100,000 times in just five weeks, and it was first archived by the Wayback Machine on the 21st of October 2001. Historians of the internet have since pointed to this as one of the earliest examples of a concept going viral in Australia.

  The email offered alternative reasons too, for those unmoved by the promise of recognition. It suggested people write Jedi "do it because you love Star Wars" or "just to annoy people". Both motivations proved sufficient. The joke answer also appealed to people who objected to the religion question on principle, treating the census form as a site of protest rather than data collection.

• 3. The 2001 Numbers

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  New Zealand recorded the highest per capita rate of Jedi responses in the world in 2001. Over 53,000 New Zealanders listed themselves as Jedi, translating to 1.5% of the population. Statistics New Zealand did not count these responses toward any recognized category. It classified them as "Answer understood, but will not be counted".

  Australia recorded more than 70,000 Jedi responses, amounting to 0.37% of the population. The Australian Bureau of Statistics, which classified those answers as "not defined", issued an official press release in response to the media attention. An ABS spokesperson noted that further analysis had been conducted since the initial data release on the 17th of June to separately identify the number of Jedi-related responses. The ABS also stressed the social consequences of providing misleading information on a census form, though it had been, as one spokesperson acknowledged, "fairly relaxed" about the issue.

  In Canada, 21,000 people entered Jedi Knight as their religion on the 2001 census. That figure was later cited by the prime minister's office as one rationale for making the 40-page-long census form voluntary.

• 4. Britain's Official Response

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  England and Wales handled their 390,127 Jedi responses in a way that surprised some observers. Census processing officials assigned Jedi Knight its own code, numbered 896. The Office for National Statistics was careful to clarify that this did not confer official recognition. Having a code simply meant it had been logged as a sufficiently common answer to the religion question.

  Before the census, officials had already addressed the legal question. Under section 1(2) of the Census (Amendment) Act 2000, which amended section 8 of the Census Act 2000, no person could be fined for refusing or neglecting to state particulars about religion. The religion question carried no legal penalty, a detail that almost certainly boosted the Jedi count.

  John Pullinger, director of reporting and analysis for the census, offered an observation that cut against the critical tone some officials adopted. He noted that many people who would otherwise not have completed a census form at all did so solely to record themselves as Jedi. The joke, in his view, had improved the quality of the census. The ONS released the final figures in a press release titled "390,000 Jedi there are".

  In Scotland, 14,052 people stated Jedi as their current religion, with a further 2,733 listing it as their religion of upbringing. Scotland's proportion was lower than England and Wales, at 0.277%. The Scottish responses were themselves itemized: 14,014 wrote "Jedi", 24 wrote "Jedi Order", and 14 wrote "Sith".

• 5. Politics and Protest

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  In June 2005, Jamie Reed, a newly elected Labour Member of Parliament for Copeland in Cumbria, declared himself the first Jedi MP during his maiden speech. The statement was confirmed by Reed's office to be a joke rather than a sincere profession of faith. Reed made the declaration in the context of a parliamentary debate about the Incitement to Religious Hatred bill.

  That same bill drew in other politicians on the joke's terms. During a subsequent committee debate, Dominic Grieve, the Conservative MP for Beaconsfield, proposed as "a bit of a joke" to exclude Jedi Knights from the act's protections, alongside Satanists and proponents of animal sacrifice. The proposal illustrated the genuine difficulty legislators faced in defining religious belief for legal purposes. In April 2006, Edward Leigh, the Conservative MP for Gainsborough, asked during a committee debate on the Education and Inspections Bill whether he would be allowed to establish a Jedi Knights faith school.

  Outside parliament, on the 16th of November 2006, two Jedi delivered a protest letter to UN officials in recognition of the International Day for Tolerance. The letter was written by Simon Cohen of the Global Tolerance public relations agency. It requested that the day be renamed the "UN Interstellar Day of Tolerance" and cited the 2001 census showing 390,000 Jedi in England and Wales as supporting evidence.

  In Montenegro, a group of young men took a different approach in the 2011 census, writing Jedi not under the religion question but under the ethnicity question. Their stated reason was that they believed ethnicity should not be an issue.

• 6. Later Censuses and Decline

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  By the 2006 census in Australia, Jedi responses had fallen from more than 70,000 to 58,053. The 2011 Australian census saw a partial recovery to 65,000, before dropping to close to 48,000 in 2016. The Australian Bureau of Statistics chose not to publish the Jedi figure separately in its 2016 reports, partly in response to campaigns by atheist groups warning that a Jedi answer would be counted as evidence of religious belief.

  In England and Wales, the 2011 census recorded 176,632 Jedi, a fall from the 2001 peak that pushed it from fourth to seventh place, overtaken once again by Judaism and Buddhism. The 2021 census saw a dramatic further decline, with fewer than 1,600 Jedi recorded in England and Wales. By 2021, Humanists UK had been actively asking non-religious people to select "no religion" rather than write in Jedi, arguing the protest answer obscured the true scale of non-belief.

  New Zealand saw a comparable pattern: from over 53,000 in 2001, the figure dropped to around 20,000 in 2006 and fell further to 19,089 in the 2013 census (which was delayed from 2011 following an earthquake in Christchurch). By the 2018 census, the count had edged back up to 20,409, or 0.43% of total responses.

  Some countries recorded Jedi responses for the first time in later censuses. Ireland's 2016 census results listed all religions receiving more than 30 responses, including 2,050 people under "Jedi Knight", representing 0.085% of respondents. By the 2022 census, that number had fallen to 1,800. The Czech Republic recorded 15,070 Jedi in 2011, a number that rose to over 21,000 by 2021, with 516 people additionally reporting themselves as Sith.

• 7. The Academic Lens

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  Sociologist of religion Adam Possamai took the Jedi census phenomenon seriously enough to discuss it in his book Religion and Popular Culture: A Hyper-Real Testament. Possamai placed Jediism within a specific methodological classification he called "hyper-real religions". His study also examined what the responses revealed about institutional attitudes, arguing that they demonstrated hostility toward new religions in Australia.

  The ABS itself articulated a position on what separates a religion from a joke answer. According to the bureau, there is no minimum numerical threshold that qualifies a religion, but there does need to be a belief system or philosophy, as well as some form of institutional or organisational structure. Jediism attracted followers who claimed to practice it sincerely, not merely as a prank. A few individuals have maintained that Jediism is a genuine faith commitment.

  The magazine Metal Hammer tested the edges of this question from another direction. The publication encouraged its readers to write "Heavy Metal" as their religion on the 2011 census in England and Wales, generating over 6,000 responses. Like the Jedi count, that figure was assigned its own processing code without receiving official recognition. In April 2009, eight police officers with Strathclyde, Scotland's largest police force at the time, were found to have listed Jedi as their official religion on voluntary diversity forms. The details emerged through a Freedom of Information request filed by Jane's Police Review.