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God's Venture CapitalistThe strange quest of Sir John Templeton.

By David Plotz
Posted Tuesday, July 8, 2008, at 1:46 PM ET

Sir John M. Templeton, the renowned investor and spiritually guided philanthropist, died Tuesday at the age of 95. In a 1997 "Assessment," David Plotz called Sir Templeton "the defining philanthropist of our time." The piece is reprinted below.

Andrew Carnegie's libraries embodied the democratic confidence of the Gilded Age. John D. Rockefeller's universities enshrined the scientific meliorism of the Progressive Era. But the defining philanthropist of our time is not a university builder or an art collector or a chair endower. It is Sir John Marks Templeton, religious philanthropist, investment wizard, amateur philosopher, and full-bore crank.

A do-gooder for the end of the millennium, Templeton pays professors to promote conservative values, universities to build character, and researchers to investigate the connections between faith and science. He believes he can reconcile the irreconcilable contradictions of contemporary society: Christian conservatism and New Age loopiness, capitalist greed and sweet charity, old-time religion and modern technology.

Before he started giving away his fortune, Templeton was one of the world's greatest moneymakers. A Yale graduate and Rhodes scholar, he began investing in the early '40s and soon proved a natural. He established the Templeton mutual fund in 1954. He was the first great global investor, buying international equities long before other American stock pickers noticed them. The Templeton Fund grew an astonishing 15 percent a year between 1954 and Templeton's 1992 retirement—a $10,000 stake in 1954 would have grown to more than $3 million by 1992. Templeton developed a cult following: Fund shareholders thronged to the annual meetings in Toronto and obeyed his every pronouncement. Even today, five years after retiring, Templeton can move the market. When he hinted earlier this year that the U.S. stock market was overvalued, the Dow dropped briefly. In 1992, he sold his company, pocketed more than $400 million, and turned full time to good works. Last year, he gave away $15 million through his Pennsylvania-based John Templeton Foundation.

The octogenarian Templeton has always been a devout Christian. (His own faith marries the strict Presbyterianism of his childhood with a sunny Norman Vincent Peale-y optimism.) But his genius as a philanthropist is secular: He brings capitalist hucksterism to religious charity. Templeton has transformed philanthropy into marketing, his own name into a brand. His earliest venture set the tone. In 1972, he inaugurated the annual Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion to remedy the Nobel Foundation's omission of religion. His brilliant stroke was to brag that his prize would be worth more than the Nobel, thus ensuring lavish press coverage. The first award went to Mother Teresa (six years before her Nobel Peace Prize. He has raised the prize's profile by awarding it to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Billy Graham, and Watergate-burglar-turned-minister Charles Colson. (The Templeton Prize helped its founder win a knighthood in 1987. In the '60s, Templeton had moved to the Bahamas—a tax haven—abandoned his U.S. citizenship, and become a British subject.)

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David Plotz is Slate's editor. He is the author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. You can e-mail him at .
Illustration by Rob Donnelly.
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