(FreedomBeacon.com)- Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that the latest UK census revealed the number of people claiming “Jedi Knight” as their religious affiliation has dropped significantly from ten years ago.
Hundreds of thousands of British citizens had recorded their religious affiliation as a member of the mystical Jedi from the Star Wars movie series on the UK census forms in 2001 and 2011. So many, in fact, that “Jedi Knight” became an officially recognized category in the data by the Office for National Statistics.
But just as it was in the movies, in the 2021 census, the Jedi have nearly been wiped out in the UK.
The latest census revealed that the number of “Jedi Knights” in England and Wales fell from 176,000 in 2011 to just below 1,600 in 2021. So few, in fact, that “Jedi Knight” is no longer a separate category but has been relegated to the “No Religion” category by the Office for National Statistics.
A spokesperson from the Office for National Statistics jokingly told Bloomberg, “It’s not so much Return of the Jedi, more the Demise of the Jedi.”
The “Jedi Knight” religious affiliation first appeared in official statistics in 2001 after an email chain campaign was launched to convince 10,000 people to declare for the mythical mystical sect.
They far exceeded their goal of 10,000, however. The campaign was so successful that 390,127 people ended up claiming “Jedi Knight” as their religious affiliation on the 2001 census.
The campaign’s success spilled over into other nations, with thousands of citizens from Australia, Canada, and Ireland, among others, also claiming to be Jedi.
But before the 2021 census, Humanist UK, a group that represents non-religious people in Britain, launched a campaign urging people not to write “Jedi” as their religious affiliation, arguing that it would be “counter-productive” to the cause of the non-religious.
In the 2021 UK census, the number of English and Welsh citizens describing themselves as Christian dropped below 50 percent for the first time ever.
