John Templeton

The investor who helped fund the search for God

John Templeton

1912–2008

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

In 1999, Money magazine dubbed Sir John Templeton “arguably the greatest global stock picker of the century.” With his wealth, he created a foundation devoted to addressing what he called the “Big Questions” of faith, science, and humanity, and established a namesake annual award that, at $1.6 million, is now the world’s richest. He died last week of pneumonia at 95.

A Tennessee native, Templeton graduated from Yale and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, said The Wall Street Journal. In 1939, he began practicing what would become his mantra—investing, as he put it, “at the point of maximum pessimism.” With $10,000 in borrowed funds, he bought “100 shares each of 104 companies selling at $1 a share or less, including 34 that were in bankruptcy.” Within a few years, he had turned profits on 100 of them, while “only four turned out to be worthless.” His investment firm made legendary returns for clients. “A $10,000 investment in the storied Templeton Growth Fund in 1954 would have grown to $2 million by 1992, when he sold his company to Franklin Resources for $913 million.”

Templeton, a Presbyterian, “believed in the possibility of religious as well as scientific advance,” said the London Daily Telegraph. So in 1973 he created the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, designed to foster inquiry into the intersection of secular and spiritual issues. “A brilliant publicist, Templeton guaranteed that his prize would always be worth more than the Nobel.” His eclectic roster of winners would include Mother Teresa, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the Rev. Billy Graham, and “Watergate-burglar-turned-minister” Chuck Colson. Templeton’s philanthropy grew to include courses and even entire schools devoted to improving what he called the world’s “spiritual wealth.” He once said, “What I’m financing is humility. I want people to realize that you shouldn’t think you know it all.”

Knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1987, Templeton—who took British citizenship in 1968—is survived by two sons and several grandchildren.