It's official: "Jedi Knight" is ON the list of religions for the 2001 UK census.

A campaign to get people to write the entry on their census forms has succeeded in the term being included on the list of religions, alongside Church of England, Roman Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu.

Sufficient numbers of people wrote the entry in for it to be allocated its own code for the census processing team to use.

But officials from the Office of National Statistics are keen to point out that just because Jedi Knight has been given its own code, that does not confer on it the status of official recognition.





"We are not defining what a religion or a faith might be," a spokeswoman said. "We are recognising what some may have entered on their census form and ensuring that our coding framework will cater for it." Other religions which are included on the list, alongside the better known cases, are the Church of Free Love, Wiccan, Divine Lightmission, and Coleraine Christian Centre. Shortly before the census last April, an e-mail was circulated in the UK stating that if 10,000 people put Jedi on the census form, it would become a "fully recognised and legal religion". A similar thing had previously happened in New Zealand, when citizens were led to believe they needed 8,000 signatures to make Jedi an official religion.

Also on the list Druidism Satanism Free thinker Wicca Celtic Pagan