The holy city of Washington DC

A westerner, a Scot, a male, an Episcopalian, albeit with Buddhist leanings." Had the author not mentioned this self-description in the introduction, it would have been difficult to deduce it from the text. In this impartial inquiry, there is neither polemic nor apology. The intelligent reader senses that Ninian Smart is a liberal Christian but one who prides himself more on the adjective than on the noun. At times, his Christian commitment resembles an engaging eccentricity of character rather than a theologically serious adherence.

Dimensions of the Sacred is an ambitious book about the three Semitic faiths, the many eastern and traditional religions and, moreover, the secular ideologies of political nationalism and applied Marxism. Smart wants religious studies to be a science about all ultimate human commitments. This "phenomenological" approach, popular in American university religious studies departments, treats each belief system as true for its participants but declines to defend any as actually true. The result is a comprehensive sociology of conviction in which the spectacular amount of new recent knowledge of world ideologies is classified and systematically explored. Before leaving Lancaster University for a post in the United States, Smart pioneered the attempt to introduce the phenomenological method in Britain. He failed. In British universities the study of religion is still dominated by confessional Christian theologians for whom Christianity is the only truth.

Smart assumes that we become religious beings simply because we "interact thoughtfully with the cosmos". But that trivialises the clash between faith and rejection: every reflective person is then automatically religious. No authentic believer defines his religious belief in terms of psychological attitude rather than theological content. This over-emphasis on the alleged centrality of the reflective attitude in religion leads Smart to claim that, for example, Christianity appealed widely to the literate Graeco-Roman world because it was really a kind of Platonism for the masses, "a poor man's philosophy". Not so. The cross was always foolishness to the Greeks. There are both philosophical and religious ways of interacting thoughtfully with the cosmos.

No one has succeeded in defining religion. It is an "ultimate concern" says Paul Tillich, unhelpfully. It is whatever a man does with his solitariness, says the philosopher A. N. Whitehead. But what if stamp collecting or sexual fantasy fills a man's leisure? Smart offers instead a characterisation of religion in terms of his seven dimensions of the sacred: the ritual, doctrinal, mythic, experiential, ethical, organisational and artistic. In his comparative analysis of Christianity and American nationalism, Smart argues that the US constitution provides doctrine and political myth; and every nation has its ritual ceremonies. Fair enough. But to call Washington DC "a sacred spot" is to blur the distinction between the sacred and the profane. In that sense, even an airport is a sacred enclave with its forbidden zones and zealous officials fully armed. But it is not a sanctuary.

Smart's categorisation of Marxism as a religion is unfair. Marxists aim at a political order free from the authority of revelation and they discern no external providence. This world is merely indefinitely complex, not irreducibly mysterious. Scientific socialism is intended to be superior to religion at least in virtue of its method if not its content. So, there are no supernatural sanctions for virtuous conduct, no transcendent realm where the errors in the moral administration of this world are rectified. The Marxists' utopia is not an analogue of Heaven or Nirvana: it is not a realm beyond history, let alone outside time and space.

Perhaps there is only us in the universe. We can understand the human wish to populate this barren immensity. But that deception is not for us. Is there a credible religion which can recreate goodness and reliably defend us against evil? The agnostic wisely suspends judgement. Ironically, agnosticism is not even mentioned in Smart's book although his method is agnostic - a hint that whatever may be the truth about the world, there is no guarantee it will be a familiar one.

Shabbir Akhtar teaches at the International Islamic University, Malaysia.