The Force be with you. And also with you.

Creating a new religion is not as easy as one might think. A 2001 email urged New Zealanders to write in by the thousands to have Jedi acknowledged as an official religion on the census. A similar, more successful campaign, took place in England, where 390,000 people actually filled out census forms declaring themselves to be Jedi Knights. At 0.7% of the population that number is still quite small compared to the 37.3 million Christians in England. Faced with a similar campaign in Australia, the empire struck back with the Australian Census Bureau threatening $1,000 fines for anyone falsifying census data on their forms. There is a Wikipedia article on the incident. Of course, the census campaign was essentially a prank and not a serious effort to establish The Force of Star Wars as a real religion, but the ability of fans to take things too far can't be overestimated.

Orson Scott Card takes a look at Jedi as a religion in a belief.net column No Faith in the Force. Card writes,

As a religion, the Force is just the sort of thing you’d expect a liberal-minded teenage kid to invent. There’s no God and there are no rules other than a vague insistence on unselfishness and oath-keeping. Power comes from the sum of all life in the universe, and it is manichaean, not Christian — evil is simply another way of using the Force. Only not as nice.

Yet, the intesrest in the neo-pagan religion of the films shouldn't be completely dismissed. As Card notes,

It shows that the universal hunger for meaning is still prevalent, even in our agnostic era, which is encouraging; but these true believers will eventually realize that the philosophy behind Star Wars is every bit as sophisticated as the science — in other words, mostly wrong and always silly.

It's interesting how many spiritual seekers are convinced the one place they know they won't find what they are searching for is in the Christian faith that is their heritage. Yet, Christians are not innocent in this. Sometimes churches have injured people who then don't want to risk getting hurt again, as referenced in a sermons in our archives called Why Bother with Church? and Hope for Fishy People.

Never one to take itself too seriously, Belief.net offers a quiz on the religion of Star Wars.