Seven Plus One
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Seven Plus One
The Seven Plus One substantive dimensions of Religion are an expanded, multidimensional framework for identifying religion by its recurring institutional components.<ref>Template:RSGR Building on Ninian Smart’s seven-dimensional model, the framework identifies the social, ritual and practical, experiential, narrative and mythic, doctrinal and philosophical, aspirational, ethical and legal, and material dimensions of religion, and adds a therapeutic or healing dimension.
Concept Map
Key Concepts
Religion >
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The Seven Plus One framework expansion by Mike Sosteric treats religion not as a single essence, substance, belief, or experience, but as a complex and multidimensional human institution. It is based on the seven substantive dimensions identified by religious studies scholar Ninian Smart, with an eighth therapeutic or healing dimension added to account for the recurring role of healing within religious and spiritual systems.
The framework challenges single-factor definitions of religion. Religion cannot be adequately reduced to supernatural belief, transcendence, ritual, morality, myth, or mystical experience. These may all appear within religion, but no single component captures the institution as a whole. A religion is more accurately understood as a characteristic bundle of mutually reinforcing social forms, practices, experiences, narratives, doctrines, ethical paths, material expressions, and healing technologies.
The Eight Dimensions
- Social and Institutional Dimension
- The social dimension consists of the people, roles, communities, and institutions through which religion is enacted and transmitted. It includes founders, prophets, priests, gurus, congregations, monastics, elders, and other authorized or charismatic figures. Social institutions preserve traditions across generations and provide agents of socialization, interpretation, mediation, and authority.
- Ritual and Practical Dimension
- The ritual and practical dimension consists of the patterned actions and practices of a religion, including prayer, worship, sacrifice, meditation, initiation, pilgrimage, and other formal or informal practices. Rituals may orient individuals toward the sacred, shape character and identity, and facilitate altered, mystical, or connection experiences.
- Experiential Dimension
- The experiential dimension consists of religious, mystical, transcendent, or connection experiences. These may range from subtle feelings of sacred presence to ecstatic union, revelation, illumination, or profound transformation. Such experiences are often interpreted through a religion’s myths, doctrines, and ritual practices and may play an important role in the emergence and development of religious traditions.
- Narrative and Mythic Dimension
- The narrative or mythic dimension consists of the stories, symbols, histories, cosmologies, sacred texts, and mythic accounts through which religious experience and practice are interpreted and transmitted. Religious narratives establish identity, teach values, authorize practices, connect communities to sacred history, and help make formative events symbolically present through ritual.
- Doctrinal and Philosophical Dimension
- The doctrinal and philosophical dimension consists of the formalized teachings, cosmological claims, theological propositions, and intellectual systems produced by a religion. Doctrines give structure and apparent clarity to myth, ritual, and experience. They are often developed and authorized by religious elites and may also serve ideological functions by legitimating social hierarchies, institutional authority, and preferred interpretations of reality.
- Aspirational, Ethical, and Legal Dimension
- The aspirational, ethical, and legal dimension provides a religion’s path, goal, and standards of conduct. It identifies where adherents are supposed to be going and what they must do to get there. Aspirations may include salvation, enlightenment, liberation, holiness, paradise, harmony, self-mastery, or the cessation of suffering. Ethical teachings define the conduct required to move toward the goal, while legal systems may make selected religious norms formally enforceable.
- Material Dimension
- The material dimension consists of the physical and natural expressions of religion, including temples, churches, sacred art, statues, clothing, relics, ritual objects, medicine bags, sacred texts, rivers, mountains, feathers, and other significant places or things. Material forms make otherwise invisible realities perceptible, support ritual, assemble communities, mark sacred geography, and may concentrate institutional wealth and authority.
- Therapeutic and Healing Dimension
- The therapeutic or healing dimension consists of religious responses to sickness, suffering, alienation, guilt, trauma, and emotional fragmentation. It includes prayer, sacrament, pilgrimage, meditation, exorcism, shamanic healing, sweat lodges, sacred plant practices, Ayurveda, psychological integration, and other technologies intended to repair, restore, or transform the individual. This dimension recognizes that religion often appears where human beings are wounded, vulnerable, or searching for wholeness.
LP Significance
The Seven Plus One framework is useful because it moves analysis away from the search for a single defining essence of religion and toward the concrete observation of what religious institutions actually do. Religions gather people, prescribe behaviour, interpret experience, transmit stories, authorize doctrine, construct paths, produce sacred objects, and respond to suffering.
The framework also reveals two recurring features of religion:
- Religions provide a diagnosis, destination, and path. They tell adherents who they are, where they are, where they should be going, and what must be done to arrive there.
- Religions provide therapeutic and healing technologies. They respond to embodied suffering and offer practices intended to restore alignment, integration, health, or connection.
From a critical perspective, the framework also makes it possible to distinguish between the human and potentially transformative aspects of religion and the institutional mechanisms through which religion may be used to reproduce hierarchy, authority, exclusion, and social control.
Quotes
“A worldview is an incarnated set of values which prescribes and is expressed through a way of life.” — Ninian Smart
“The very beginning, the intrinsic core, the essence, the universal nucleus of every known high religion … has been the private, lonely, personal illumination, revelation, or ecstasy of some acutely sensitive prophet or seer.” — Abraham Maslow
“The term ‘religious experience’ covers an exceedingly disparate array of events: from the vaguest glimmerings of something sacred to rapturous mystical unions with the divine, or even to revelations.” — Rodney Stark and Charles Y. Glock
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