Is it even a religion if the magic and the lore are actually real and not just propaganda slogans to rule the gullible masses? It always bugged me how people draw these kinds of parallels. I mean come on.
Yes. The religion is the mythology and mysticism built up around the scientific fact of the force.
It's the same way that the church uses the "feeling of the spirit". I.e. the euphoria that people get when singing loudly together. That doesn't require religion either, but it's been co-opted by it.
The Jedi order is predominantly a paradigm- a way of seeing and perceiving the Force.
There’s other Force traditions that have existed- most of which were in fact stamped out with a few being absorbed into the order.
Predominately, the Order did that by taking force sensitive children and brainwashing them to follow their own paradigm rather than the paradigm of the culture they were “born to.”
Not, in point of fact, like how Christian churches forced indigenous children into their schools and brainwashing them to follow their ways. Or trying to.
If we knew for a fact that the Judeo-Christian god was real, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, etc would still all be religions. Just because the force is real in Star Wars doesn't change the fact that the doctrine around being a Jedi makes it a religion/faith.