'Star Wars' Chosen as a Religion in the Czech Republic's Census

Editor's note: the original version of this post was truncated mid-sentence during the site's migration. It has been completed as an original piece.

When the Czech Statistical Office released preliminary findings from the 2011 nationwide census in mid-December, the headline figures were about a population growing more solitary, more secular, and more reluctant to declare religious affiliation at all. But the number that traveled around the world was this one: 15,070 — the count of Czechs who wrote "Jedi" in the religion box.

The Czechs were not the first. The Jedi census phenomenon began in 2001, when an email campaign urged citizens of the UK, Australia, and New Zealand to list Jedi as their religion; some 390,000 people did so in England and Wales alone, making Jedi — briefly, unofficially — one of the country's largest stated religions. The joke has recurred in every census since, in country after country.

It is easy to dismiss as a prank, and partly it is. But the statisticians take it seriously enough to count it, and sociologists of religion see something real underneath. In the Czech Republic — one of Europe's most secular countries, where the census showed traditional religious affiliation continuing its long decline — writing "Jedi" is a way of saying two things at once: I am not nothing, and I refuse your categories. It is a declaration of spiritual independence disguised as a punchline, or perhaps a punchline disguised as a declaration of spiritual independence.

There is also a quieter point about the census itself. A census religion question assumes that belief comes in the recognized denominational boxes the state prints. The 15,070 Czech Jedis are a reminder that lived belief is weirder, more playful, and more personal than any form allows — and that when the form doesn't fit, people will write in the margins.

May the Force be with the Czech Statistical Office. It clearly needs a sense of humor to do its job.