More than 70 000 Australians identified their religion as Jedi Knight on last year’s national census, officials said on Tuesday.
A representative for the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) said 0,37% of respondents, or 70 509 people, claimed to follow the Jedi religion featuring in George Lucas’ Star Wars movies when they answered a question on the census form about religious beliefs.
The representative said the respondents were apparently responding to an email that circulated before the census was taken which erronously claimed if 10 000 people nominated themselves as Jedi then it would become a legally-recognised religion.
Australian Star Wars Appreciation Society president Chris Brennan was not amused by the proliferation of Jedis down under. He said most of the would-be knights were probably not ”true believers”.
”When you look at it you probably have got about 5 000 people in that 70 000 that were true hard-core people that would believe the Jedi religion carte blanche,” Brennan told ABC Radio.
”Then you would have 50 000 fans that said ‘oh yeah we’ll just put down Jedi for fun, we don’t actually have a religion of our own’.
”Then you probably have 15 000 people who did it just to give the government a bit of curry.”
The ABS said the number of Jedi-related answers was not enough to skew the accuracy of the census, which is taken every five years to provide a snapshot of Australia’s population. – Sapa-AFP