God's Venture Capitalist
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.)
Post retirement, Templeton demonstrated a knack
for tapping into popular culture. He has, for example, cast himself as a
guardian of Christian morals and a bulwark against political correctness. The
"Templeton Honor Roll," announced with much fanfare last month, celebrated 126
universities, departments, professors, and even textbooks that uphold
traditional (i.e., conservative) educational values. Professional moralist
Gertrude Himmelfarb and conservative economist Milton Friedman won $25,000
lifetime-achievement awards. Conservative scholars Walter Williams, Julian
Simon, and Mary Lefkowitz also made the roll. The "Templeton Honor Roll for
Character Building Colleges" rewards more than 100 schools that "promote
character development." The "Templeton Honor Rolls for Education in a Free
Society" boosts colleges that promote market economics. The "Templeton Laws of
Life Essay Contest" awards $2,000 to adolescents who write essays about
spirituality. The "Templeton Prize for Inspiring Movies and TV" (now renamed
the "Epiphany Prize") gives $25,000 to movies and TV shows that acclaim faith.
(Favorite nominee: CBS's Touched by an Angel .) He's Bill Bennett with a
bankroll.
But
Templeton is more than just a conservative sugar daddy. His moralism is a
sidelight to his much more ambitious goal: the reunification of science and
religion. Other philanthropists endow chairs and build hospitals: Templeton is
trying to refashion the world's intellectual fabric. He is, if this is not an
oxymoron, a religious technocrat. Since the Renaissance, science has
outstripped faith, and Templeton views this as a great tragedy. He believes
that theologians must match science's advance with spiritual research, and
attempt to rejoin the soul and the brain. Religion should harness the tools of
science to make "progress." "Progress" is his favorite word, though no one, not
even Templeton himself, seems to know what "progress" in religion would
mean.
Templeton has, almost single-handedly, revived the field of
religious science. He gives 100 colleges $10,000 a year to teach courses in
science and religion. He offers the same amount to medical schools for classes
on "healing and spirituality." The Templeton Lectures send scholars to campuses
to opine on faith and science. Templeton may appeal to New Age softheadedness,
but he's much more rigorous than the crystal-and-shaman crowd. He believes in
hard science. Favorite projects include a Duke University study on the
relationship between prayer and longevity, and research at Johns Hopkins into
how meditation alters brain activity. Last year he awarded the Templeton Prize
to a respected Australian cosmologist who argues that the structure of the
universe reflects intelligent design. Even so, the entire enterprise reflects a
mad obsessiveness: What to make, for example, of the "Templeton Prizes for
Exemplary Papers in Humility Theology"?
Templeton's magnificent
crankhood reaches its apotheosis in his own writings. His new book (published
by, naturally, the Templeton Foundation--a true vanity press) is Worldwide
Laws of Life . As ambitious as its title, it lists 200 "eternal"
spiritual/ethical laws that purportedly apply to all people, in all times, in
all places. No kidding. This is Templeton unvarnished, didactic, optimistic,
scientific, grandiose beyond imagination: "Behind this book is my belief that
the basic principles for leading a 'sublime life' can be examined and tested
just as science examines and tests natural laws of the universe." Worldwide
Laws of Life is an incredible volume--a weird combination of Thomist canon
law, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People , and Successories. Some
of the laws are biblical aphorisms: "As you give, so shall you receive." Most
are platitudes of high banality: "Every ending is a new beginning." "What the
mind can conceive, it may achieve." (Of 200 laws, seven come from the Bible,
four from Ralph Waldo Emerson, two from Henry Ford, and 65 from
Templeton himself.)
And yet, even at his most
peculiar, Templeton stays true to his scientific and capitalistic principles:
If you send him a new law and he adds it to the next edition of Worldwide
Laws , he'll pay you $1,000. If you teach a course about Worldwide
Laws , he'll pay you $10,000. And if you want to scientifically "prove" or
"disprove" one of the worldwide laws, he'll fund the experiment.
