History & overview · every faith gets one
A prank on four censuses that some of the respondents meant.
Jediism takes the Force from the Star Wars films as a real description of an energy field binding living things, and the Jedi discipline — calm, self-mastery, service, refusal of anger — as a way of living by it. It entered public life as a hoax: a chain email before the 2001 censuses in England and Wales, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada claimed that a religion with enough write-ins would be officially recognised, and hundreds of thousands wrote Jedi. Congregations formed afterwards among people who were not joking, and the two things have been tangled ever since. The United States has granted one of them tax-exempt religious status; England and Wales has refused another charitable registration on the ground that Jediism is not a religion in charity law.
Why it is filed this way
Filed as parody because that is what put it on the record — the 2001 census campaign was a prank and everyone involved knew it. The congregations that formed afterwards are a different matter and say so plainly, and the regulators disagree about them. The Temple of the Jedi Order holds United States 501(c)(3) status as a church, granted in 2015. On 16 December 2016 the Charity Commission for England and Wales refused to register the same body, finding that Jediism lacks the necessary spiritual or non-secular element and could be advanced and followed as a secular belief system. Both rulings are about the same organisation and the same doctrine.
Living, but far smaller than the census numbers ever suggested. The write-in was a one-off protest; the congregations that formed afterwards are small, and no reliable count of them exists.
The founding
The 2001 census campaign spread by email and produced 390,127 Jedi responses in England and Wales, more than 70,000 in Australia, about 53,000 in New Zealand — the highest share anywhere — and around 21,000 in Canada. None of the statistical agencies treated it as a religion. The write-in fell to 176,632 in England and Wales in 2011, and for the 2021 census the Office for National Statistics folded the category into its parent: No religion: Jedi Knight. Meanwhile the Temple of the Jedi Order took a Texas charter as a religious corporation on 25 December 2005, and the Jedi Church was set up in New Zealand in 2007.
No single founder — Jediism accreted rather than began.
What it holds
Reality. A single field of energy generated by living things, which binds the galaxy together and can be attended to, aligned with and drawn on — held by most Jedi as a real force rather than a metaphor..
The divine. No god. The Force is not addressed in prayer and is not a person; it is described as a field and approached through meditation and conduct..
Death and after. Most Jedi take the individual to return to the Force at death rather than to persist as a self. The point is not developed doctrinally..