Abstract
Jedi religion is a perplexing cultural phenomenon, based on the Jedi Master mythology of the Star Wars movies, which drew heavily upon westernized visions of Zen Buddhism. In official government censuses held in 2001 there were 70,509 Jedis in Australia, 21,000 in Canada, 53,000 in New Zealand, 390,127 in England and Wales, and 14,052 in Scotland. It seems likely that most of these people were secularists who merely used a Jedi campaign to complain against any connections between church and state, yet within these larger numbers there were smaller groups that seriously proclaimed themselves adherents to the new Jedi religion. This chapter closely examines the online presence of the Temple of the Jedi Order and the Jedi Church, and considers more briefly several competing groups including the Institute for Jedi Realist Studies, the Church of Jediism, and the Temple of the Jedi Force. These groups occasionally hold local meetings or conventions, but most often communicate actively through website-based forums and Facebook groups. Thousands of other would-be Jedis interact within an online virtual world named Star Wars: The Old Republic, which is called a multi-player game but actually is more like a living novel or movie series in which the user becomes one of the characters having somewhat realistic adventures on a galaxy of planets that are caught in a cold war between two factions, each of which has a religion: Jedi for the Republic, and Sith for the Empire. Three censuses – of 2000 and 3082 and 1424 avatars – document that supernatural Jedi and Sith roles are more popular. These virtual Jedi and Sith may not “really believe” in the divine Force or possess real magical powers, and yet for hundreds and even thousands of hours of their lives they experience transcendent roles by means of information and communication technology. Whether experienced as faith or fantasy, Jediism encourages meditation, martial arts, and completion of quest dreams. To at least some degree it confers meaning upon the universe, and asserts that humans have cosmic significance.
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Bainbridge, W.S. (2017). Jediism: The Most Popular Online Virtual Religion. In: Dynamic Secularization. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56502-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56502-6_5
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