Are the Jedi a Religion? (Part One)

A friend recently zapped me with this puzzler. We know, from Episode IV, that both Han Solo and Governor Tarkin identify the Jedi as a religion—Solo calls it a “hokey religion,” and Tarkin tells Darth Vader he is “all that is left of your religion.” Yet the characterization of the Jedi as a religion hasn’t always sat well with everybody. If the Jedi are a religion, what are their doctrines and beliefs? Where are their houses of worship? What is the Jedi god?

Superficially, the Jedi resemble a religion, or at least a religious order. They share belief in a transcendent Force binding reality, and practice physical and mental disciplines to attune themselves to it. Yoda, in Episode V, talks expansively about belief. The prequels reveal the existence of a Jedi temple, Jedi robes, even Jedi haircuts. Like Tibetan or Dominican monks, they have a progress, from novitiate to adept to master, representing spiritual stages.

Does this, however, make them a religion? The U.S. Marine Corps shares a haircut, uniform, celebrated headquarters, order of ranks, physical and academic drills, and shared principles, spoken aloud much like Christianity’s Apostles’ Creed or Islam’s five daily prayers. The Corps even has its own hymn! Yet nobody would mistake the Marines for a religious order. Clearly the making of a religion starts deeper than the movies’ superficial traits.

We immediately get crossways on the difficulty of creating a meaningful definition of the word “religion.” When George Lucas wrote Episode IV, originally entitled simply Star Wars, the ascendant definition came from Princeton anthropologist Clifford Geertz, in his 1966 essay “Religion as a Cultural System.” Geertz’s definition is so influential that it deserves quoting in full: religion is

(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-standing moods and motivations in men [sic] by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

Admittedly this looks opaque, but Geertz clarifies his meaning sufficiently that readers, at least those familiar with dense “academese,” can follow his meaning. Geertz’s definition seemed so airtight to Euro-American scholars that it obtained in scholarly circles for about four decades. Thus it dominated during the years both the Original Trilogy and the prequels had pop culture standing.

This definition, in context, pretty concisely encapsulates many science fiction religions: Jedi, Frank Herbert’s Bene Gesserit, and Philip K. Dick’s Mercerism. But in the Twenty-First Century, Geertz’s system has come under criticism for primarily describing Christianity, and most especially Protestantism as practiced in North America and Northern Europe. It sees religion as both private (“I believe”) and separate from mechanisms of public order.

Geertz’s critics, led primarily by Talal Asad, note that other religions don’t see the Enlightenment-era division between individual faith and community structure implicit in Geertz’s definition. In the loose cultural confederation sometimes called “the West” we have Christianity, which describes belief, and Christendom, which describes a territory where Christianity has been historically widespread. Islam or Hinduism are, by contrast, both faith and people, simultaneously.

(Judaism’s maintenance of unique identity through ritual, even as belief in God dwindles, deserves mention here, though explication can wait for later.)

In Episode VIII, Luke Skywalker seems to reflect this distinction. He advocates ending the Jedi Order, on the expectation that by doing so, the Force will devolve outward to everyone. (How this will happen without mentorship, he elides.) Where the old Jedi hoarded their knowledge inside a Temple, enforced purity tests upon its novitiate, and purged apostates, Luke apparently wants everyone to access the Force equally, regardless of membership in any formal order.

Luke’s arc within Episode VIII apparently moves toward reconciliation of the Asad and Geertz models of religion. By the end, Luke recognizes the importance of the Jedi as centralized order of career religious within a larger mass of citizen believers. Just as Benedictine monks and Sufi mystics hoard nothing fundamentally from mainstream Christians and Muslims, respectively, Jedi needn’t necessarily hoard Force access from anyone else—though like medieval monks, they apparently did.

Therefore, within the canonical movies, the Jedi have religious trappings which reflect Western society’s struggle to reckon with religion in itself. The Jedi’s diminished importance within faith in the Force parallels organized religion’s diminution, even as less systematic spirituality remains widespread. But that doesn’t really express whether the Jedi are a religion. For that, we need to consider what the Jedi actually claim to believe.

PART TWO
PART THREE