Allnutt’s book became an instant bestseller and resonated with both fans and the broader Christian community. When I mentioned Allnutt’s book to Albin Johnson, he laughed nostalgically. “I devoured that book,” he said. “It was plain English enough that I followed along; I must have read it three times.” It allowed young Albin to reconcile Star Wars with his parents’ Christian faith and made him resolve to “stick it out and harbor a secret love for Star Wars.”
Lucas himself was never much of a Christian, as much as he had been raised Methodist. He certainly carried around a concept of God—“I’m simply struggling through life, trying to do God’s bidding,” he told Dale Pollock in 1982—but his use of the G-word diminished in later years as his views evolved. In 1999, Lucas was told by the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, “You sound awfully Buddhist to me.” Lucas responded: “My daughter was asked at school, ‘What are you?’ And she said we’re Buddhist Methodists. I said, well, I guess that’s one way to describe it.” A few years later, he elaborated to Time magazine: “I was raised Methodist. Now let’s say I’m spiritual. It’s Marin County. We’re all Buddhists up here.” *
Much of what we learn of the Jedi in the prequel trilogy follows this part-Christian, part-Buddhist theme. We see an order similar to the Knights Templar or celibate warrior monks. We hear a lot about nonattachment, a key Buddhist tenet; we learn that “anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering”—suffering being the result of all attachment, according to the Buddha. Anakin Skywalker becomes a fallen angel, the Satanic Vader. But this biblical downfall happens because he is too attached to the idea of defeating death and saving his wife.
The prequels complicate our notion not just of the Force but of the Jedi knights themselves. We see the Jedi in repose, in what looks like prayer or meditation, depending on your point of view. But we also see an order that is too rigid, an order destroyed, like the Templar, because it was dragged into war by its attachment to being “guardians of peace.” Everything in the original trilogy tells us the way of the Jedi is the last hope of the galaxy. But everything in the prequels tells us the Jedi themselves had flaws that were all too human. It’s as if Lucas built a religion by accident and then decided to tear it down at its foundations.
At the same time as Lucas was making the prequels, a grassroots effort to create a kind of Jedi church was under way—but in a far less serious sense than you might think.
In February 2001, New Zealand was one week away from its usual once-a-decade census. Someone in the country, anonymous to this day, took a look at question 18, which dealt with religious affiliation, and saw a chance to have some fun. “We are trying to encourage people to tick the ‘other’ box and then fill their religion in as Jedi,” said an anonymous email. “All Star Wars fans will understand.” The writer claimed, falsely, that the country would be forced to recognize Jediism as an official religion. His or her second objective: “it’s a bit of an experiment in the power of email.”
It’s safe to say the experiment succeeded. With one week’s notice, some 53,715 New Zealanders ticked the “Other” box and wrote in “Jedi.” The government refused to recognize it as an affiliation—but unofficially, “Jedi” became the country’s second largest religion.
For the census in Australia that August, the same email was overhauled. This time it was claimed ten thousand was the official barrier to a new religion. There was a new incentive: “Remember, if you are a member of the Jedi religion then you are by default a Jedi Knight.” In some versions, there was a coda: “If this has been your dream since you were 4 years old . . . do it because you love Star Wars. If not, do it out of badness.”
The Australian government struck back, warning that anyone who went to the Dark Side by putting a false answer on a census form was liable for a penalty of $1,000. Though the idea of the government issuing a fine to any or all of the self-declared Jedi beggars belief, census officials were in earnest. “For a group to be included in the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ classification of religion, it would have to show that there was an underlying belief system or philosophy,” said Hugh McGaw of the Census Processing and User Services. Some seventy thousand Australians risked the fine and wrote in Jedi anyway, perhaps in the hope that someone would come along and reveal that underlying belief system. (Nobody was ever fined.)
New Zealand and Australia were just the beginning. Jediism spread to Canada courtesy of a couple of DJs in Vancouver; twenty-one thousand Canadians wrote it in their census. Subsequent counts in Croatia, the Czech Republic, and Montenegro all found thousands of Jedi living in their country. Ireland has refused to divulge how many Jedi live on the Emerald Isle. But the all-time prize for the Jedi chain-mailers was the United Kingdom, which reported more than four hundred thousand Jedi within its borders, after the government made it clear that nobody would be fined for writing it in, and indeed embraced it as a method to increase census response rates among teens and twentysomethings. Those four hundred thousand respondents represented 0.7 percent of the population, making Jedi the United Kingdom’s fourth largest stated religion after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism.
So far, so amusing. But how much of this was a real reflection of the spread of Jediism, rather than just done to annoy officialdom or to make a point about having to put your religion on your census form? Turns out, not so much. Consider that in the 2001 census, 14.7 percent of the United Kingdom put down “no religion.” For Star Wars–loving atheists and agnostics, “Jedi” may be simply a more interesting personal statement than “no religion.” Consider also that the largest percentages of Jedi in the United Kingdom seemed to live in major college towns: Brighton, Oxford, and Cambridge all had roughly 2 percent Jedi. Much of the response was essentially a student prank.
Still, there followed an onslaught of Jedi headlines. Politicians found they could get attention by latching on to the notion of a Jedi religion. In 2006, Labor’s Jamie Reed used his maiden speech in Parliament to declare himself the first Jedi MP. His office confirmed that this was a joke; he was trying to prove that religion, in the context of a parliamentary bill on hate crimes, was a hard thing to define. But the headlines didn’t hurt. Nor did they for a Conservative MP who brought up a possible Jedi exclusion to a religion bill in 2009.
Ordinary UK residents also made the news by claiming affiliation with the Jedi. A couple of Londoners calling themselves Jedi delivered a petition to the United Nations Association calling for the forthcoming UN International Day of Tolerance to be renamed the UN Interstellar Day of Tolerance; the Daily Mail couldn’t resist doing a photo feature. Then, in 2009 in Bangor, North Wales, a man named Daniel Jones was asked to remove his hoodie in a Tesco supermarket; he claimed he was the founder of “the International Church of Jediism” with “500,000 followers worldwide.” Newspapers reported this without comment; in fact, Jones’s church has little more than 500 followers on Twitter. “It states in our Jedi doctrination [sic] that I can wear headwear,” Jones said, after he had presented the Tesco manager with a church business card and was ejected. A Tesco spokesman put his best spin on the incident: “If Jedi walk around our stores with their hoods on, they’ll miss lots of special offers.”
The closest thing one can find to a Church of Jediism is the website Jedichurch.org; this international umbrella group currently claims 6,300 members on Facebook. That may be the same size as the 501st Legion, but the group has none of the 501st’s coherence. The content is largely the same as any Facebook group: jokes, news items, inspirational images, the occasional political cause. A member writes that they’re getting the Jedi Code as a tattoo. Someone posts a quote from the Dalai Llama; another posts a video of lightsaber twirling; yet another updates us on a unicycling Darth Vader in Portland, Oregon, who plays flaming bagpipes.
More power to them all. But having a fun Facebook group does not a religious order make. The Wikipedia page on Jediism says it all: “Jediism has no founder or central structure.” Imagine a religion with
no religion. As Lucas’s third mentor, Joseph Campbell, put it: “All religions are true. None are literal.”
The number of Jedi in censuses since 2001 has also risen and (mostly) fallen. In her research, Jennifer Porter draws a distinction between “Jedi realists,” who call themselves Jedi but reject the religion label and prefer to think of Jediism as a philosophy of life, and Jediists, who claim to follow an entirely new creed. Some Jediists claim to follow something called the Twenty-One Maxims (Prowess, Justice, Loyalty, Defense, Courage, and I’ll spare you the rest) gleaned from the now inactive website jediism.org. Porter estimates that there are at least five times more Jedi realists than Jediists. “There was an ideological power struggle,” she says, “and the Jediists got stomped.”
That sounds about right. The Jedi I’ve encountered are very postmodern about the whole thing. Things are just as one Presbyterian respondent to Porter’s survey wrote: “I suspect that all or most of these Jedi are not really practicing the faith they profess to believe in anyway. They just want cool lightsabers.”
I can’t seem to spin my lightsaber forward. This is a problem. Spinning your lightsaber forward is the first thing you learn in lightsaber class. If I can’t master this basic move, my training will be limited indeed.
Alain Bloch, our instructor, is doing his best to show us. Looking the part in robes, long leather Jedi boots, and feathered hair à la Anakin Skywalker, he points out what he’s doing in the studio mirrors. “Forward spin, thumb and forefinger. Forward, open up your palm, palms open out.” My wrist doesn’t want to turn like that. I can’t even see how his is turning. It’s a blur. “Just let the momentum of the blade carry you through the spin. Now you can go a bit faster.”
Regardless of my poor ability, the class moves on. Soon we’re practicing spinning our sabers backward, slashing them in figure eights with each hand, and whipping them out from behind our backs. Bloch has Star Wars soundtracks playing in the background, accompanied by the occasional echoing clunk as another lightsaber falls to the floor.
We’re at the regular Sunday afternoon meeting of the Golden Gate Knights, a three-hour Jedi training school held in a dance studio steps from the start-ups of San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. Bloch’s two-year-old class was featured on the websites of the BBC and Los Angeles Times. Then the BBC turned to him for comment when a Scottish clergyman expressed fears that the disestablishment of marriage in the UK would lead to people “being married by a Jedi.” Bloch declined to contribute: he’s a Jedi realist. “All of it is rather crap,” he says of Jediist tracts. “I tell people, just go to the source: Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, whatever. Because all of the pseudo-religious philosophy in Star Wars is just that.”
I found a surprisingly diverse crowd in Bloch’s class—about as many women as men, young as old, Caucasian as not. There was a healthy stream of couples on dates, gay and straight. Every week, we had visitors from foreign climes. One guy came all the way from Madrid; it turned out he had started leading a similar class there. If you want a snapshot of the Star Wars audience, it’s right here. It looks like everyone.
Lightsabers, in short, are a global obsession. There’s an annual worldwide contest for the best lightsaber video on YouTube called Sabercomp. (The results are spectacular and well worth looking up.) In Germany, I met the Saber Project, a large and earnest group of fluorescent lightsaber makers that performed a mass battle demonstration before a thirtieth anniversary screening of Return of the Jedi. In 2013, Harvard and MIT scientists were able to bind together tiny molecules made out of photons. “Scientists Create Lightsaber Technology,” the headlines screamed. In Shanghai, one company has gone so far as to sell an extremely powerful handheld laser as a “lightsaber”—it might not be able to slice off someone’s arm and cauterize the wound, but it will certainly take your eye out.
But who wouldn’t want the chance, at least once, to swing something you can convince yourself is a real lightsaber? The sabers the Golden Gate Knights use are a vast improvement over the $10 telescoping kind found in Toys “R” Us. Bloch offers blades in abundance, all custom built by groups similar to the Saber Project as well as assorted online individuals. Each handle has a different style, a different grip, a well-honed metal sheen. They emit just the right hum; some are modified with accelerometers and impact sensors and make the famed clashing sound when they meet. A tough translucent tube houses a beam from a powerful florescent LED; it’s enough to feel there’s a laser blade in front of you when the lights are on and to make everyone in the class go “ooooh” when the studio lights are dimmed and the mirrors reflect our blades into infinity.
The easiest way to describe lightsaber class is that it’s one part fencing, one part yoga. The goal is to learn a numbered system of fight choreography worked out by Bloch and his cofounder Matthew Carauddo, who runs the same class in a studio in Silicon Valley. You and I could meet for the first time with our lightsabers at a Comic-Con, say, and I could utter a string of numbers and you would know that I was going to slice around your body in a star formation and parry appropriately. We could even throw in flourishes such as the figure eight, or something more elaborate Bloch calls the “Obi-Annie” (but which is actually a move called “plum blossom” from the martial art Wushu). We would for one moment shed our nerd shells; we would look cool.
It’s a far cry from the rolled-up newspaper and “zhoom, zhoom” noises my friends and I would employ as kids. I was delighted to learn that everyone—even Ewan MacGregor and Liam Neeson, when they began training with sticks for their lightsaber battles in Episode I—makes the noises when they start out. As kids in the 80s, Bloch and his friends would battle with flashlights in darkened rooms. “We had our rules about it,” he says. “Usually we would have to stop and decide if someone had blocked the blade in time. I suspect we spent more time refereeing the fights than actually fighting.”
Bloch came to learn the way of the lightsaber after an unusual experience at the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada in 2006. One attendee, in an act of the kind of bizarre generosity that permeates the event, handed out ten thousand lightsabers, with the instructions to “meet at sunset for an epic battle royale.” Two sides, each hundreds strong, charged at each other in the middle of the desert, in the nerd version of a giant pillow fight.
The experience changed Bloch. He felt inspired to start walking the streets of San Francisco dressed as a Jedi. One day in Dolores Park, the palm tree mecca of the Mission District, a man came up to him and said, “I see you have two lightsabers.”
Bloch, who indeed was carrying two lightsabers for the first time—red and blue, Sith and Jedi—said, “Yes I do.”
“Well,” said the man thoughtfully, “we should do battle, then.”
And battle they did. Bloch came armed with rules: if you touched the other guy’s torso three times with the lightsaber, you won. Later Bloch met another man at a party who challenged him to a duel and asked if he remembered the epic battle royale at Burning Man. This was Hib Engler, the guy who handed out the ten thousand lightsabers in the first place. They fought twice. Both men won a duel. The circle was complete.
Bloch tried to brush up his skills through fencing class, stage combat class, and martial arts. But nothing on offer was quite like being trained to use a lightsaber. Finally, Bloch found Carauddo through a YouTube video demonstrating his technique and his custom sabers. Carauddo gave Bloch one lesson, and Bloch said, “You know, people would pay to do this.” He found the studio and started to prove himself right. The guy from Dolores Park was one of the first; two years on, Bloch estimates he’s had nearly a thousand students. The suggested donation (ahem, Lucasfilm) is $10.
A few more lightsaber-spinning exercises—doing a reverse figure eight behind your back, letting the lightsaber leap from hand to hand—and then we move into the fight choreography. “First, chamber your attack,” Bloch says, meaning pull the blade into your side, held with two hands (always hold your lightsaber with two hands unless yo
u’re doing a spin or flourish), pointed up and ready. Then swing at your opponent, pivoting the handle with your higher, leading hand at its fulcrum, using the back of the blade as a lever with your lower hand. If you get it right, it should snap to a halt just before it hits them.
When you watch experts like Bloch and Carauddo do this, it’s a marvelous, energetic whirlwind, very much in the style of the movies; Carauddo, short and stocky, moves like a Jedi Tasmanian devil. But when I look at myself in the mirror, trying to remember whether attack 3 or attack 4 is on the left or the right, I don’t see a Jedi. I see Ghyslain Raza.
Ghyslain Raza is probably the best-known figure in the world whose name almost nobody knows. In November 2002, he was a heavyset fourteen-year-old attending St. Joseph’s Seminary, a private school in Trois-Rivières, Quebec. There was a school play coming up, and Raza was directing a Star Wars skit. He needed to work on some moves for the actors.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 11