In thirty-three years as a Professor of Religious Studies, Ninian Smart was the single most important figure in the development of the subject in British education, and a strong influence more widely in Australia, North America and New Zealand.
He was born in Cambridge in 1927, son of Scottish parents, the astronomer and mathematician William Smart and Isabel (nee Carswell). Moving to Glasgow, where his father became Regius Professor of Astronomy in 1937, he attended the Glasgow Academy. In 1945 he entered the British Army, where he served in the Intelligence Corps, learned Chinese and was a year in the East, mainly in Sri Lanka, attaining the rank of Captain. Demobilised in 1948, he studied Classics and Philosophy at Oxford. He taught philosophy at the University College of Wales (1952-55), and at Yale (1955-56), where he also did graduate work in Pali and Sanskrit. In 1954 he married Libushka Baruffaldi, and they had four children. He was Lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Religion at London University (1955-61) and was then appointed as the first H. G. Wood Professor of Theology in Birmingham. In 1967 he became Founding Professor of Religious Studies at Lancaster University.
He estimated that in the mid-1950s there were only sixteen persons in British universities and colleges teaching religions other than Christianity. Now all relevant departments include at least an option in another tradition, and most of them have 'Religious Studies' as part of their title. It is difficult now to recall that then the emergence of religious studies as a higher education subject was controversial.
It was not untypical for Theology or Divinity students to spend 90% of their time on events, texts, persons and language solely up to the fifth century C.E. In Ninian's view, this restriction to ancient credentials was a defensive response to the problems of an almost exclusively Christian theology in a secular setting. He believed passionately that a more open, plural and contemporary approach was needed to widen this constricting focus and the best way forward for the study of religion and for theology itself.
There were many voices for change, but the creation of the departments at Lancaster and then at Newcastle marked a decisive point. He was proud that currently more than 100 Lancaster graduates have posts in higher education worldwide. He had created a new space for thinking about religion.
At Lancaster in the early 1970s he was director of major projects for the Schools Council on the teaching of world religions in schools. This was the first systematic attempt at clarifying the confusions of the 1944 Education Act on the teaching of religion in schools. The proposal have, of course, been greatly revised in practice over the past twenty-five years, but that impetus to re-think has been of lasting effect. Ninian Smart's abiding emphasis was upon religion as an aspect of human experience, and he held it to be vital that students had acquaintance with more than one tradition so as to generate reflexion upon the extreme differences, and occasional similarities, of religious systems. He saw this awareness as an urgent issue, clearer now when such systems are perhaps in even more visible extensive contact and collision than at any time in the past. In his view the study of religion is necessarily 'polymethodic'. Existing