May the Force Be with You!   William Sims Bainbridge  Pages
395-403, 422 in The Sociology of Religious Movements New York:
Routledge, 1997  Pages 395-403:  The thesis of this concluding
chapter is that religion will constantly renew itself through
religious movements, indefinitely into the far-distant future.
To this point in the book, every story that introduced a chapter
has been true, but here our challenge is to imagine the future
of religion, so history may be of little help. Therefore we
begin with one of the most familiar science-fiction stories, the
three-part Star Wars saga, treating these popular movies as if
they were true.[1] Amazingly, this is a religious trilogy,
postulating a religious movement totally independent from the
Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition and situated in a highly
advanced technological society. Perhaps George Lucas, the
creator of Star Wars, will forgive us for finding our own
meanings in these films, and we shall avoid dipping into all the
ancillary novels and television prod