Fictional religions: The morphology and reception of invented religions imbedded in works of fiction

As a consequence of the decline in the power of religious institutions throughout the 20^th century, ‘fictional religions’, that is invented religions embedded in fictional works, have increasingly become a source of religious inspiration for contemporary Westerners.
People are for instance inspired by the Jedi Knights and the concept of the Force in George Lucas’ Star Wars movies and by the enchanted world and spirituality of the Elves in Tolkien’s fantasy works The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.
When the religious beliefs and practices of people are based largely on fictional religion, rather than on texts claiming to be revelations, I speak of ‘fiction-based religion’. In my project I study two fiction-based religions that both took form in the 1970s and gained momentum with the internet in the 1990s: so-called ‘Jediism’ based on Star Wars and spirituality based on The Lord of the Rings. I do internet ethnography with interviews and participant-observation to study the ideas, practices and social organisation of the two movements.
Jediism is by far the largest fiction-based religion. In support of this view are the facts that ‘Jedi’ is the tenth most common religious self-identification on Facebook, that more than 500,000 people reported to be Jedi in the 2001 UK and Dominions census, and that Jedi groups are recognised bythe authorities as religious bodies in several states.
The central research questions are: (a) How can the rise of fiction-based religion be explained? (b) How can the success of Jediism vis-à-vis the relative failure of Tolkien-spirituality be accounted for? The first question will be addressed through an analysis of the changes in the religious field since the 1950s, with an emphasis on de-institutionalisation, mediatisation and the rise of internet and participatory culture. My approach to the second question will be an analysis of the religious morphology of Star Wars and Tolkien’s books and a discussion of whether the difference in success can be explained from the fact that fictional religion in Star Wars is better adapted to a contemporary cultural/religious context and (possibly) to the human cognitive apparatus and therefore more likely to catch on than the fictional religion in Tolkien’s works.