Editors’ Note: Pete Jordan discusses the worldview and associated philanthropies of one of the twentieth century’s most successful investors, Sir John Templeton (1912-2008), based on his new book, God’s Philanthropist: John Templeton and the Pursuit of Progress (Oxford, 2026).
For many grant-seekers whose ideas challenge the status quo or push fields into uncharted waters, the three Templeton philanthropies – Templeton Religion Trust (TRT), John Templeton Foundation (JTF), and Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF) – are a financial lifeline. Founded by one of the twentieth century’s most successful investors, Sir John Templeton (1912-2008), the three organizations, which together control billions of dollars’ worth of assets and annually disburse hundreds of millions of dollars of grant funding, support a wide range of activities. Yet as each grant recipient works toward their project’s immediate goals, they also build the world Templeton sought to establish. As my new book God’s Philanthropist: John Templeton and the Pursuit of Progress argues, behind the foundations’ funding choices is an intellectual and philanthropic vision synthesized from diverse religious, scientific, and political-economic elements, a vision that prioritizes specific forms of material and spiritual progress, made via particular mechanisms and people, in a political-economic environment Templeton hoped would accelerate and sustain that progress for the long haul. By weaving these and other historically contingent elements together, Templeton crafted a worldview and promoted forms of progress unimaginable before the historical era during which they emerged.
I first became interested in Templeton’s philanthropic efforts when, after periods of study and research in engineering and biomedical science and then in theology and religious history, I landed a role as a full-time external advisor to TWCF. It was the responsibility of our small team of recently-minted PhDs – a team with backgrounds spanning psychology, art history, theology, religious studies, and political philosophy, among other fields – to help aspiring recipients of TWCF’s funding develop proposals that fulfilled the applicant’s own research and programmatic desires, while also aligning with the founding donor’s ambitions. I initially knew little of Templeton and his thinking, although I sensed some complementarity between his philanthropic aspirations and my own interests thanks to his foundations’ ongoing funding of work at the intersections of science and religion. Having just completed a doctorate examining some of the historical intersections between English Protestant Christianity and early modern science, I was pleased to embark upon the task of advising a major science-and-religion funder to (among other things) help grow that field and facilitate excellent research and programmatic activity within it.
As I soon learned, all funded projects supported by any of Templeton’s philanthropies must sit neatly within one of a handful of funding areas he prescribed for them. To ensure that every project we developed aligned with his philanthropic goals, each team member had to develop a sophisticated understanding of every area’s meaning and scope. Our grasp of the intention behind these funding areas, together with our understanding of a given project’s methods and purposes, culminated in the careful crafting of a donor intent statement for each prospective grant. The purpose of this roughly paragraph-length argument is to reassure the foundation’s trustees that the project under consideration fits into the funding area that has been designated for it, and therefore accords with the foundation’s mission.
Despite prior training in two of the key subject areas he cared about, I at first found it difficult to grasp precisely what Templeton was interested in and why his philanthropic interests took the form they did. It was only by reading his funding area descriptions against the backdrop of his many published and unpublished essays, speeches, and books, and by piecing together his broader thinking from these writings, that I began to see how each funding area reflected a larger interconnected way of seeing and making sense of the world, a worldview that Templeton laid out unsystematically and in piecemeal fashion across them. Although the funding area descriptions are at times very brief – several are just one sentence long[1] – each contains one or more traces of Templeton’s worldview. Those traces – a word, concept, idea, or historical person he names – are simultaneously gateways to Templeton’s wider thinking, and conduits through which his personal commitments delimit the interpretive possibilities of each funding area. By circumscribing how the funding areas should be understood, their presence ensures that projects will sufficiently align with the changes to the world at large that Templeton wanted to make to warrant the foundations’ financial support.
Templeton’s first major philanthropic venture was the creation in 1972 of what was then called the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. Reflecting later in life on his turn to philanthropy, Templeton says he realized that helping people with their spiritual growth was far more important than helping them add zeroes to their bank balances. Yet the religious traditions that historically had scaffolded spiritual growth had in his judgement become staid and backward-looking—and were losing adherents as a result. Templeton’s answer was to encourage those traditions and the institutions that nurture them to make progress, much as other domains like science, economics, and medicine do, so that they would attract newcomers and keep hold of those already on the inside. Speaking to the audience gathered to celebrate Mother Teresa’s recognition as the inaugural Prize laureate in 1973, Templeton placed progress at the center of the religious agenda: “Progress is needed in religion as in all other dimensions of human experience and endeavour.”
In later writings he considered how such progress might be made by religious geniuses—saints, prophets, and others who venture into new domains and return with new spiritual insights, including ones that may disturb long-cherished views. He also contemplated whether progress might occur through forms of dialogue, and even of competition, between religions, with the latter subjecting competing parties to forms of testing that might reveal each one’s strengths and weakness. By calibrating the Prize’s monetary value to be always slightly larger than that of the Nobel Prizes, Templeton sought to elevate religious progress above progress of every other kind. To illuminate his religious commitments and especially his desire for religious progress, in the book I position Templeton’s theological thinking – his reflections about God, the nature and purpose of human beings, and the world – and his desire for religious progress in the context of liberal Protestantism (a strand of religious history that is receiving renewed scholarly attention), attending especially to the indelible mark that New Thought and Unity Christianity thinkers left on him.
Among numerous theological ideas Templeton took from New Thought figures including H. Emilie Cady (1848-1941) and Ralph Waldo Trine (1866-1958) is the notion that all created things are visible manifestations of an invisible creator. This understanding of the world led him to develop and maintain a very high view of science, because studying the world necessarily tells us something about its creator; as he put it in in his 1976 Prize speech, scientists’ “increasing discoveries are in reality discoveries about God.” Templeton gambled that science too might lead to new forms of progress in religions, and would help religions get unstuck from the statis and backwardness that increasingly beleaguered them. This hoped-for religious payoff of science – a domain and set of activities that since the nineteenth century had largely sought to excise any religious connections – is central to Templeton’s thinking, and through the funding instructions is fundamental to the grantmaking vision he set for his foundations. It also underwrites Templeton’s personal interest in thinkers and ideas that are part of the academic field of science and religion, the field of which I was already part when I started as a TWCF advisor. As I suggest in the book, the specific shape that Templeton’s interests in science and religion take can best be understood by locating them among pre-existing conversations about the historical and contemporary science-religion relations that historians, theologians, and others have long fostered.
One of the book’s chief contributions is its exploration of Templeton’s views of political economy, an area of his thought that has received little attention from previous commentators. From at least the early 1960s Templeton interpreted the world as a zone of perpetual combat between two archrivals: “dictatorship” and “personal freedom.” The former represents any socialist, Communist, or other ideology featuring government ownership of the means of production, central economic planning, the stifling of personal initiative, and a host of other (for Templeton) problematic political and economic conditions. Such environments, he wrote, constitute a “road back to serfdom,” a clear reference to the popular 1944 book Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek (1899-1922), one of a small handful of figures named in the philanthropies’ funding area devoted to individual freedom and free markets. By contrast, “personal freedom” refers to the free and competitive climate Templeton hoped would eventually prevail everywhere, one in which entrepreneurs may freely create and invest in new forms of progress that Templeton believed would improve the economic conditions for everyone. To make sense of Templeton’s political economy commitments I relied on recent scholarship on the nature of conservatism in the United States, on the backlash against the New Deal that simmered away during the middle decades of the twentieth century, and on the emergence of neoliberalism and the impact of the Mont Pelerin Society on contemporary society. Scholars often use membership of the Society as a convenient “neoliberalism detection device”; records indicate that Templeton was a member from 1980 until his death. While I argue that Templeton appears to have been sympathetic to neoliberalism’s desire to encase the market to protect it from nation-state intervention, I also suggest that extant sources may leave an incomplete picture of the extent of his ties with or affinity for neoliberalism. In the book I also explore how Templeton’s political economy commitments intersect with his religious convictions, the latter construed so as to underwrite rather than undermine the former.
Awareness of the complex intellectual background behind Templeton’s philanthropic pursuits has many potential benefits, one of which is the informed vantage point it provides for understanding how the three philanthropies he founded choose to present themselves publicly. Typically, the worldview woven from these religious, scientific, and political-economic (and other) commitments manifests only partially in the philanthropies’ self-descriptions of their funding interests and priorities. JTF currently deploys widely legible labels (“Life Sciences,” “Mathematical and Physical Sciences,” “Religion, Science, and Society,” and “Public Engagement”) alongside others that are more narrowly Templetonian (“Character Virtue Development” and “Individual Freedom and Free Markets”) to depict its funding emphases. TWCF talks about “Big Questions in Science and in Religion” rather than “Religion, Science, and Society,” suggesting that both it and JTF may have concluded that Templeton’s own idiosyncratic label for his principal funding area – Humility-in-Theology – may face significant communications challenges with their audiences. At the same time, TWCF also lists “Genius,” “Genetics,” and “Voluntary Family Planning” among its core funding areas, all of which Templeton himself established (albeit with genius and genetics linked within a single funding area, rather than as separate ones).[2] TRT eschews discussion of Templeton’s original funding areas, preferring its own focal areas – currently in covenantal pluralism, the study of mysticism, and the social consequences of religion, among others – rather than the founding donor’s stipulated areas in its public communications, even as the latter lie behind the former and constitute areas into which all funded projects within these focal areas must fit.
All of these emphases represent organizational choices about which funding areas to promote and which to pass over in silence, which worldview commitments to display and which to omit. Only when the bigger picture is made visible – the very task undertaken by God’s Philanthropist – are the partial pictures presented by each foundation recognizable as partial, that is, as parts of the greater whole that is John Templeton’s progress-focused worldview and philanthropic project.
-Pete Jordan
Pete Jordan is Research Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion in the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford, Director of Academic Projects at Green Templeton College, University of Oxford, and Research Fellow and Project Consultant at Scholarship and Christianity in Oxford (SCIO).
[1] The descriptions may be found in John Templeton, Possibilities for Over One Hundredfold More Spiritual Information: The Humble Approach in Theology and Science (Templeton Foundation Press, 2000), 180-185.
[2] In the book I explore Templeton’s views of genius and of genetics, and also examine the connections he establishes between the two.
