“I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing”
A Brief Defense of Jediism and Syncretic Religion
In the Star Wars canon, the Jedi are described as being members of a religious tradition. After all, Jedi are essentially space-Sōhei who live in temples, wear ascetic robes, and have a litany of sacred texts, mantras, and practices. However, in a lovely syncretic emergence, this religion has migrated from the fictional Lucasian universe to our own, where it has appropriately taken the name Jediism.
The Temple of the Jedi Order is only one example of this phenomenon. They’re a largely online group of Jediists who claim to be a legal Jedi church and ministry. According to the Temple, Jediism is based around “observ[ing] a metaphysical entity called the Force…”, and Jediists abide by three core values in their lives: focus, knowledge, and wisdom. The also live in reverence to the Jedi Code, the mantra of the Jedi that appears throughout Star Wars movies, novels, and video games:
There is no emotion, there is peace.
There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.
There is no passion, there is serenity.
There is no chaos, there is harmony.
There is no death, there is the Force.
I’m choosing to be charitable and believe that the Jediists are not simply weirdly committed to ironic online personas, and that they truly hold these beliefs very genuinely and seriously. If you explore their forums, you’ll see members of the Temple helping each other with meditation techniques, offering moral encouragement and ethical wisdom, and even debating the real-world limits of force powers such as telekinesis. (Now, from what I can tell most Jediists don’t believe these powers are real, but there are also plenty who seem open to believing in their existence.)
I also want to point out, again, that Jediism isn’t an exclusively online community. Members of another group, The Church of Jediism, regular have in-person gettogethers and attend conventions as a groups — they even offer in-person Jedi marriage services.
Unsurprisingly, many people don’t think Jediism is an actual religion. To be fair to these skeptics, their first encounter with Jediism was probably when it was added to the census as a joke in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand in 2001. In the end, nearly 1% of the Welsh and English populations choose this option, many of them likely only for a little chuckle. It is perhaps because so many see them as a joke that serious Jediists have ran into barriers upon barriers of red tape when trying get their faith officially recognized as a religion by state bureaucracies. Their last attempt at political legitimacy was in 2016, when the United Kingdom government rejected their application to be officially recognized as a religious charity; allegedly, Jediism “lacks the serious spiritual or non-secular element of a religion.”
The United Kingdom was wrong, that seems obvious; Jediism is clearly a religious tradition in the full sense of the term. It’s numbers may be much smaller than other religions, but in terms of the substance of their orthodoxy and orthopraxy, the Jediists can hold their own against almost all other religious traditions in the West (admittedly, that’s not saying a terrible lot). Jediisms drawing from pop-culture certainly shouldn’t be a disqualifier either. Throughout history, religious adherents have taken from (and given to) their respective popular cultures; Jediists are merely participating in this same type of cultural interplay of adaptation, reworking raw cultural ore into refined religious beliefs, gods, metaphysics, and rituals.
However, their source material they are working with does prevent unique challenges for Jediism that other traditions have not had to deal with. That is, their source material is held under copyright lock-and-key by Disney and the United States government. The proliferation of intellectual property law has a profound effect on this cultural production aspect of religious formation, because cultural raw materials have become increasingly enclosed as the private domains of corporations. Just like land enclosure in the 18th century eroded peasants abilities to give and take to and from common land, IP enclosure has eroded our ability to give and take to and from common culture, and even to simply interpret culture.
If Zeus had been a trademarked in Ancient Greece, Greco-Roman mythology would be a mere husk of the rich treasure trove it turned out to be. If the Pentateuch had been copyrighted, much of the New Testament would have been aborted by cease-and-desist letters. Religious innovators and mystics have always taken frameworks and archetypes and language from their cultures; that’s a fact clear as day to anyone who spends even the most minimal amount of time studying religion. However, while spiritual exemplars like Mohammed, Krishna, and Samson belonged to the people, spiritual exemplars like Yoda, Qui-Gon Jinn, and Bendu belong to an incredibly IP-jealous corporation.
Still though, the power of Disney has not been enough to ward off grassroots fans of particular spiritual inclinations from creating religious traditions around their content. In fact, these types of religions are common enough that sociologists have categorized them as “hyper-real religions” — innovative and syncretic mixings of traditional religious elements with popular culture content. While browsing through the Jediists’ forums, it’s particularly easy to see a sort of Buddhist-Christian syncretism occurring, for instance. This hyper-real religiousness isn’t isolated to Star Wars, of course: in the early 2000s, Matrixism (or The Path of the One) formed, and many pagans, neopagans, and Druids have incorporated facets of the Harry Potter story into their practices, often labeled as Snapeism.
Like all of the best religious traditions in history to one degree or another, these spiritual outgrowths of fandoms are a participatory culture — the adherents don’t merely consume the culture, but also co-create it. It’s no secret that, despite IP law, Disney is not the sola fons of Star Wars culture — fans are a massive source as well. They create sometimes brilliant fanfiction, they dissect and commentate on the films and shows, they create elaborate iconographies and outfits. Participatory cultures offer common people the chance to acquire certain levels of social capital and recognition, even (and especially) while operating outside of the official institutions and power structures. Yes, Kathleen Kennedy wields nearly pontific power at Lucasfilm, but that doesn’t stop regular fans from building channels with hundreds of thousands of followers, being posthumously canonized, getting to appear on-screen as extras, or even becoming Masters in the Church of Jediism.
Once again, I’ll assert the religious legitimacy of Jediism, at least in the particular forms mentioned here that are practiced by genuine adherents. Not only is Jediism as a legitimate religious tradition, but it’s a true example of a grassroots cultural production, and the fusion of these two is a religious phenomenon from time immemorial. Yes, they draw from the raw materials of copyrighted stories and ideas, but so what? The Jediists are only using the same strategies and participating in the same cultural exchanges that that have borne all new religious traditions. The content of their beliefs is obviously somewhat heterodox, but the religious and traditional framework itself is not.
While I am not a member of a Jediist group myself, at the very least it is a much-welcomed ally in the struggle of those who embrace transcendence against the materialism of modernity. As a religious mystic and fanatical fan of Star Wars, I have to admit that I have a deep sympathy for and attraction to the faith. I have already become flirtatious enough with religious syncretism to comfortably think of myself as a something like a Vedantic Christian with heavy pagan and Neoplatonist leanings — why not add “Jedi” into the mix as well?
“I am one with the Force and the Force is with me.”
- Chirrut Îmwe
