Ninian Smart was a philosopher and scholar of religion whose work helped broaden the comparative study of religious life. His dimensional approach directs attention to practices, stories, experiences, institutions, and other features alongside explicit beliefs. It offers questions for inquiry into how a tradition works.
The University of California, Santa Barbara’s departmental history records that he joined its faculty in 1976 as a professor in philosophy of religion and comparative religion. It also records his retirement in 1998 and his death on 29 January 2001. This academic setting provides the context for understanding his contribution.
Why study dimensions as well as beliefs?
A statement of belief can be important without describing everything a community does. Two people might affirm the same proposition while taking part in different forms of worship. A visitor might observe a ceremony without understanding the memories, obligations, or experiences participants associate with it.
A multidimensional approach encourages the researcher to notice those differences. It also prevents a text explaining doctrine from being treated as sufficient evidence of how every member lives. The task is to investigate connections among activities, meanings, and relationships.
Descriptions of the framework vary. A Kenyon College teaching handout lists seven dimensions of religious or secular worldviews, ending with an artistic dimension. Mikael Stenmark’s article on worldview studies discusses a six-dimension account in an earlier work by Smart. Naming the version used makes a comparison easier to assess.
Seven dimensions as questions for investigation
The following questions expand the short labels in the Kenyon handout into a working outline:
- Ritual: What repeated actions, ceremonies, or patterns of practice matter?
- Experience: How do participants describe encounters, feelings, or changes associated with religious life?
- Myth or narrative: Which stories organize memory, identity, and understanding?
- Doctrine: Which ideas or explanations are taught, debated, or treated as authoritative?
- Ethics: What conduct, responsibilities, and values are commended or required?
- Social life: How are belonging, leadership, and relationships organized?
- Artistic expression: What roles do images, music, buildings, and objects play?
These questions identify areas to investigate. An empty space in a student’s notes may mean that evidence has not yet been gathered, rather than that a community lacks that dimension.
A worked example: studying a community memorial
Imagine a religious community holding an annual memorial service. This is a hypothetical teaching example, not a case reported by Smart. A visitor sees a procession, a period of silence, a reading, singing, and a collection for a local support project.
The visitor can begin with the order of actions. Which recur each year, and which are specific to this occasion? A printed program may establish the planned sequence, while observation shows what actually happened. Those are related pieces of evidence, rather than interchangeable records.
Next comes the question of experience. A person standing silently might feel grief, hope, distraction, or uncertainty. Appearance alone cannot establish which. Participants’ own accounts can illuminate what the occasion means to them, including differences within the gathering.
The reading might recount an earlier community’s deliverance, while a speaker draws a conclusion about divine care. The story and the explanatory claim should each be understood on their own terms. A researcher should also ask who selected the reading and whether alternative interpretations are heard.
The collection introduces an ethical question: what responsibility does the community say it has toward those receiving support? Its organization raises further questions about decision-making and accountability. Observing money change hands does not establish the recipient’s circumstances or the effect of the help.
Finally, the building, music, memorial objects, and arrangement of seating may shape how the occasion is experienced. Their meaning requires inquiry. A prominent image could be an object of devotion, a historical reminder, or a decoration; its visibility alone cannot decide the matter.
Putting these observations together produces a richer account than recording only the speaker’s beliefs or the number attending. It also reveals where the researcher needs additional evidence.
Understanding an account and evaluating a claim
There are different tasks within such a study. One is describing what participants say and do. Another is explaining historical development or social organization. A further task may be assessing a philosophical argument or a factual claim.
For example, recording that a participant believes a ritual brings protection is evidence about that person’s interpretation. Establishing that a particular protection occurred would require an appropriate investigation of that further claim. The two statements should not quietly be substituted for each other.
Similarly, understanding why a rule matters does not decide whether it is just. A detailed account can make the grounds of disagreement clearer while leaving an ethical debate open. Accurate description and critical questions can therefore belong in the same inquiry.
Worldviews beyond explicitly religious traditions
Stenmark discusses Smart as an early advocate of extending inquiry to religious and secular worldviews. In his own proposal, a worldview includes beliefs, values, and attitudes concerning reality, a worthwhile life, and what people can know or rationally believe. He argues for more philosophical attention to secular outlooks as well as religious ones.
That proposal broadens the questions available for comparison. A hypothetical secular remembrance gathering might also involve an account of shared history, commitments about responsibility, repeated actions, and forms of belonging. Identifying such features does not require participants to call themselves religious.
Comparison can investigate similarities while preserving differences in self-description, authority, and belief. A shared pattern of gathering does not establish that participants secretly hold the same theology.
Keep diversity, history, and context in view
Harvard’s Religion and Public Life program sets out three core principles for studying religion: traditions are internally diverse, change over time, and are embedded in culture. It also distinguishes devotional assertions within a tradition from a nonsectarian study of religion. These are useful methodological cautions alongside a dimensional outline.
A researcher should therefore specify the community, period, and setting under discussion. A leadership statement, a household practice, and a dissenter’s account may reveal different aspects of a tradition. Selecting one and silently applying it to everyone would erase evidence the inquiry should preserve.
Language needs similar care. In this kind of analysis, calling a story a myth identifies a role in a worldview; the label alone does not prove historical falsity or truth. Likewise, identifying an institution says little about whether every member accepts its decisions.
The framework becomes useful when it generates better observations and more precise questions. Treating it as a scorecard for deciding which religion is most complete would turn an aid to inquiry into an unsupported ranking.
Conclusion
Smart’s dimensional approach helps readers study religion through more than isolated propositions. Ritual, experience, narrative, doctrine, ethics, social life, and artistic expression open related areas of investigation.
Its value lies in the care brought to those questions: distinguish observation from interpretation, identify whose account is being presented, and examine variation and change. The result can be a more detailed understanding of religious and secular worldviews without assuming that they are identical or deciding their truth by counting features. This is a contribution to comparative inquiry that readers can apply to texts, institutions, and lived practices.
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