Did “The Force” influence the Census?
Happy Star Wars Day everyone – May the 4th be with you!….In line with this theme, here’s a brief look at the “Jedi” phenomenon and how it affected the Australian Census.
Prior to the 2001 Census, a bunch of Star Wars fans around the world decided that it would be good to get “Jedi” recognised as an official religion. For some reason, someone decided that if 10,000 people in the country put down a religion on their Census form, it would suddenly be recognised as an official religion (presumably with tax fee status for Yoda, and a nice office overlooking the harbour).
This was around the time of the release of the 3 “prequel” Star Wars films, and Star Wars fans, never particularly quiet, were rather prominent walking the streets with their lightsabres. So an email was circulated encouraging Star Wars fans to write their religion in the “Other” box as “Jedi”, and it gained pretty wide coverage – now it would doubtless go through Facebook and Twitter and get even wider coverage, but this was before those days, when plain old email was the primary means of electronic communication.
This figure of 10,000 is of course completely untrue, but don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. The religious beliefs counted in the Census are defined in advance of the Census, and have to meet criteria about belief in a supernatural being, set of canons, and all sorts of things which are set out in the Standard Classification of Religious Groups (yes, ABS has a classification for everything!) No actual number of adherents can constitute a religion.
Actually I can’t see why Jedi couldn’t fit into this. There is a whole section in there on “No Religion”, which includes non-religious groups, such as “Atheism” and “Humanism”. “Satanism” is also a valid option!
But the ABS dug their heels in, with a media release, saying that it’s very important not to falsify Census information, and Jedi wasn’t a religion etc. This media release is still available on the ABS website, 10 years on.
People are prosecuted every Census for refusing to fill in the form – Census is compulsory and vital information for Australia’s future – everyone should fill it out as accurately as possible. However Religion is and always has been an optional question – the Australian constitution prevents governments from forcing people to reveal their religion. In 2006 11.2% of the population chose, quite legally, not to answer the question. That’s a lot more than the number who answered Jedi.
Anyway, a lot of people did follow the email, and answered “Jedi”, or some other variant such as “Jedi Knight”, “Jedi Master”, “Sith Lord”, or “Padawan”. Such was the interest that after 2001, the ABS put out a media release with the actual number of people who responded with one of these.
The upshot was that in the 2001 Census, there were just over 73,000 Jedi in Australia, or 0.37% of the population. To put in perspective, if it was allowed as an “official” religion, it would’ve been larger than the Salvation Army, Seventh Day Adventists, and only slightly smaller than Judaism. But all the Jedi were put into “Religious Belief, nfd”, and made up about a third of the 229,000 people in this category. There are some wierd and wonderful religious beliefs in this category – anyone heard of “Pastafarian” (look it up!)
In 2006, there was far less hype about the Jedi (George Lucas had finished releasing the “Revenge of the Sith” a year before, and it was a all a bit old hat), so while we expect that there were some responses on the 2006 Census, it’s likely to have been well down on 2001. In any case, the ABS didn’t release the number.
The amazing thing is that “The Force” did have an effect on the Census. You can see the effect that the Jedi had by looking at any of .id’s community profiles.
Generally the “No Religion” response, which includes anyone who ticked that box on the form, plus the few who take the trouble to tick “Other” and write in “Atheism”, “Agnosticism” etc., has been increasing for many Census periods – Australia has become a more secular society. This trend is apparent from 1991 through to 2006, WITH THE EXCEPTION OF 2001 in most areas.
These are the figures Australia-wide:
- 1991 Census – 12.9% No Religion
- 1996 Census – 16.6% No Religion
- 2001 Census – 15.5% No Religion
- 2006 Census – 18.7% No Religion
At the same time, the “Religious Belief, nfd” category hit a peak of 229,000 in 2001 before falling by almost 100,000 in 2006.
Using some common sense, I’d suggest that if you were a strong believer in a “traditional” religion, you would probably put that down on the form, so the Jedi have probably taken a lot of people who would otherwise have ticked the “No Religion” box, and relatively few from the other religions. Because they are taken out of there, it shows up as a dip in 2001 for this category.
You can see this in the online community profile for most areas with a strong “No religion” response, eg. City of Yarra, City of North Sydney, City of Tea Tree Gully (despite its moniker as the City of Churches, Adelaide actually has a very high proportion of people with no religion!).
So these things do have an impact on the results if people do them in enough numbers, and can mask real trends in society. That’s why it is important to be accurate on the Census form – the information is used for long periods of time in a wide variety of areas.
For more background to the Jedi Census phenomenon worldwide, see this article in Wikipedia.
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Nice work, although I’m not sure that the constitution forbids the government to ask people their religion, they’re just playing safe and/or being culturally sensitive I would say. The constitution forbids the Commonwealth ‘imposing any religious observance’, I can’t imagine stating religion in a census amounts to religious observance
That’s interesting. I assume the bit on freedom of religious observance is where it has come from. That was the explanation for the optional nature of the religion question when I was at the ABS, anyway.
There are a number of points I wish to raise here:
1) I do not think our Government should be in the business of deciding what is a religion and what is not. The ABS maintain a list of acceptable answers to the census question, which effectively restricts the “official” religions recognised by our Government.
2) While it’s a strange joke to play on the ABS and the Government, the Census is used for critical purposes. As such, the information reported should be as accurate as possible. Marking yourself down as a “Jedi” will not force the ABS to classify it as a religion – your Census is counted as if you did not answer the question. This dilutes the underlying truth.
3) If you are concerned about the $450 million spent on placing chaplains into public schools (then telling them they cannot be religious), or the discrimination against homosexual marriage, or the intrusion into private medical decisions by superstitious ideas, or preventing people from dying with dignity, or the $3 billion of tax free dollars in the “purple economy” annually, then for god’s sake mark yourself down as “no religion”.
See http://censusnoreligion.org/ for more information.
Hi Andrew, thanks for your interesting response. It’s good to see the upcoming Census generating some discussion.
1. Unfortunately the ABS do need a classification for everything (in fact it’s one of their favourite activities, developing classifications), otherwise the Census data becomes unwieldy and impossible to process. The good thing is that everyone should be able to have an input into the inclusion and wording of the questions for 2016 – I’ve got a blog article coming up about just that.
2. Agreed – everyone should answer the Census accurately, as I said in the article. But writing Jedi, or some other non categorised answer isn’t equivalent to not answering the question. It goes into the “Not Defined” category, which is included in the ABS standard output (the BCP) under “Other religious affiliation”. This is very different to “Not Stated”, which means the answer was left blank on the form.
3. Certainly if people don’t subscribe to a particular religious belief, by all means put down no religion. However, “No religion” (technically, the “No religion, nfd” category) doesn’t necessarily imply atheism, as your website seems to suggest by encouraging people to mark it. If you class yourself as an Atheist, Agnostic, Humanist or Rationalist (which I’d guess most of your members would), there are subcategories of No Religion that provide for these more detailed answers. You need to tick “Other” and write your answer in, the same as with any religion that isn’t one of the main tickboxes (which are just based on the highest number of responses last Census). While some atheists and humanists may object to having to tick a box that implies having a religion, it is really just done that way for brevity of the form. Rest assured that any of these 4 responses do get coded to subcategories of “No religion” and are included in the broader count for this category.
BREAKING NEWS: ABS in the leadup to the 2011 Census have released the number of Jedi from the 2006 Census – As far as I know this was never released before as the number was subsumed into the larger “Religious Belief not further defined” category. Apparently there were 58,053 people who wrote Jedi Knight on the form, a decline but not a substantial one from 2001, considering it was well out of the news by then.
Glenn;
given the controversy and possibility for misunderstanding the options available, perhaps a more comprehensive range of answers would be preferable in future census forms; currently most people will just tick ‘no religion’, rather than entering a specific, thus giving you skewed statistics.
I don’t believe most non-theist Australians know the difference between (agnostic, atheist, bright, freethinker, humanist, naturalist, rationalist, , skeptic), a simple explanation would be helpful if they are meant to fit in a proverbial ‘box’.
Glenn, I’m not entirely sure that “writing Jedi… isn’t equivalent to not answering the question”; in my view it is ‘worse’. It’s extremely unlikely that any of the people answering in this way actually believe that they are a Jedi and are following the canons and traditions of their (alleged) faith. Thus, it’s deliberately answering incorrectly rather than not at all, but the practical outcome is actually worse from a data-integrity point of view because it actually affects the result, as you have demonstrated.
I can understand that point of view. However you could make the same case for those who leave the question blank – if they are skewed towards one particular cultural group it can significantly affect the result too.
How dare you presume that we Jedi do not have a deep seated belief in the Force! We have as much rationale for our belief as any other religion!
Hi Gary,
Good point! I did mention in the original post that I couldn’t see why the ABS thought Jedi didn’t meet the criteria for a religion. However I am rather skeptical that the 73,000 respondents in 2001 and 58,000 in 2006 were all true believers in the Force as you clearly are.
I’d hope that genuine Jedi adherents such as yourself would be discouraging those just writing it in “for a laugh” (and who, based on the graph would likely normally be putting “No Religion”), so you can get a clearer picture of the penetration of the Force in Australian religious life.
We’ll look at it when you discount all the non-participants who put down one of the old religions on their form based purely on what they were raised in rather than any current practice or belief.
It’s a bit difficult to see what all the fuss is about. The question is ‘optional’ anyway (though not sufficiently clearly designated as such). Therefore, no matter detail is entered, it cannot have any real importance in the bigger picture, as there would be a significant enough proportion of people who would choose not to answer (as they should, morally, choose not to answer any of the racialist and personal questions in the 2011 census).
It is now 20 years on from that census. Attitudes about a huge range of things have changed. The Government are considering a raft of changes to laws around religious beliefs. I am still strongly drawn to the concept of a force we can tap into. I was a census respondent who nominate Jedi for religion. It is no less silly than the fundamental beliefs of all other religions. When people say they have “found Jesus”, I am of the opinion they have simply found an inner strength that was there all along. It is a shame that the Jedi Faith has not been nurtured into full bloom.