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Jedi Is 7th Most Popular English Religion

Jew or Jew not. There is no try.

by
Liel Leibovitz
December 12, 2012
(Collage Tablet Magazine; original photos Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images and Mojoey/Flickr.)
(Collage Tablet Magazine; original photos Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images and Mojoey/Flickr.)

Feel the force, those English do: Newly released census data shows that 176,632 people in England and Wales identify as Jedi Knights, making followers of Yoda practitioners of the most popular of the “Other Religions” category and the seventh most popular faith overall.

This may seem like an irrelevant curiosity, but you can learn a lot by looking at a map of Jedi per counties. Margate, Broadstairs, and Southend-on-Sea, for example, seem to be particularly dense with lightsaber-wielders, proving yet again that the closer English folks
get to France, the more likely they are to trust that only strange and elusive mental faculties would save them from ruin.

But the Jedi shouldn’t rejoice: In 2001, 390,127 people described themselves as members of the Church of Latter Day Lucas, a drop of 54 percent in the course of one decade. So to our British friends who are looking for a new religion based on a story of a small band of rebels facing insurmountable odds as they fight a malicious empire and are aided by what could only be described as supernatural miracles, we say only this: Happy Hannukah. Do we have a religion for you…

Jedi Religion Most Popular Alternative Faith [Telegraph]

Liel Leibovitz is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast Unorthodox and daily Talmud podcast Take One. He is the editor of Zionism: The Tablet Guide.