John Templeton, the billionaire investor who died yesterday at Nassau in the Bahamas at 95, was considered by some the finest stock-picker of the 20th century. But his foundation doles out millions of dollars to increase what he called “spiritual wealth.”

As the creator of the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities, Templeton tried to create a kind of Nobel Prize for spiritual improvement and made sure that the annual monetary award — currently $1.6 million — outpaced the Stockholm medals.

His Templeton Foundation, a separate organization from the prize, has supported large-scale research projects into the efficacy of prayer and forgiveness. According to the foundation, it exists “to serve as a catalyst for discovery in areas engaging life’s biggest question.”

“I’m one of the few people in the world who don’t hesitate to say that spiritual information will multiply one hundredfold,” he declared to Money magazine in 1999. “Hardly anybody in the world will dare say that.”

But nearly everybody would agree that the spiritual capitalist was a master of harnessing the capitalist spirit.

Unassuming, courtly, and preaching humility, Templeton was a Wall Street prodigy who made several fortunes by buying at what he called the market’s “point of maximum pessimism”; essentially “calling the bottom.”

He did it first in 1939, when he correctly sensed that the American economy would flourish thanks to World War II. Using $10,000 in borrowed money, he told his broker to buy 100 shares in each of 104 companies trading under $1, including 34 in bankruptcy. He sold out near the end of the war having quintupled his money.

After the war, Templeton helped lead the way to investing in foreign markets, something few American brokerages had any involvement in.

His Templeton Growth Fund invested heavily in Japan and Canada, and later in China and Eastern Europe, and maintained a spectacular rate of return of 14.5% annually between 1954 and 1992. The fund grew dramatically after going public in 1959, but the stellar results continued.

During the brutal first half of the trading year of 1969, when every other mutual fund on Wall Street was down, the Templeton Growth Fund gained 8.7%. He liked to open annual meetings of his mutual fund with a prayer, not for material gain but to clear investors’ minds.

If a business is not ethical, he told Insight magazine, “It will fail, perhaps not right away, but eventually.”

He sold his funds in 1992 to Franklin Group for a reported $913 million.

Templeton was born November 29, 1912, in Winchester, Tenn., not far from Dayton, Tenn., where the Scopes “monkey trial” would unfold 12 or 13 years later, contesting the connections between religion and science. His father was a cotton-gin operator and self-taught lawyer.

Templeton recalled later that an ethic of self-reliance suffused his upbringing. Accepted at Yale University, he was the first in his town ever to attend college, and he put himself through school by founding a student newspaper and selling ads.

While still in school, he had a central insight: “There were hundreds of boys from wealthy families, but not a single one who was investing outside one nation,” he told SmartMoney in 2004. “Surely they’d get better results if they searched everywhere rather than limiting their search to one country. … So I saw a wide-open opportunity.”

After graduating in 1934, he attended Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship and earned a law degree from Balliol College in 1936. He then embarked on a round-the-world voyage of discovery that redoubled his determination to invest abroad.

Settling at first in New York with his wife, Judith Folk, Templeton worked for the investment firm Fenner & Beane. He later took over a small Wall Street firm managing but $2 million annually. By 1970, its business had grown to $400 million.

He launched the Templeton Growth Fund in 1954 in Canada, taking advantage of the country’s lack of capital gains taxes. Specializing in research and with disinterested precision, the firm invested heavily in the 1950s in Japan, which had a reputation for shoddy goods but where price to earnings ratios were in the low single digits. Profits were spectacular as companies such as Hitachi and Fujifilm prospered.

While living in Englewood, N.J., in the 1950s, Templeton was involved in philanthropy on a minor scale. He joined the board of the Presbyterian Princeton Theological Seminary, where he served 42 years, a dozen as chairman. Throughout his life, he professed a fairly nonliteral reading of Presbyterianism.

Templeton made a big splash with his 1972 announcement of a “religion Nobel,” though snarky newspapers pointed out that the first year’s prize, $88,400, was in fact $11,600 less than that year’s recently increased Nobel.

Mother Teresa was awarded the first Templeton Prize in 1973, but the award was hardly confined to Christians. Over the years, it has gone to Buddhists, Muslims, and Pandurang Shastri Athavale, leader of a Hindu spiritual movement he founded in India, Swadhyaya. Other winners include Billy Graham, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Charles Colson, the former counselor to President Nixon who founded the Prison Fellowship. For the past decade, recipients have been exclusively Anglophone professors of physics, mathematics, and philosophy; since 2001, the prize has been called the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities.

The foundation, founded in Radnor, Pa., in 1987, funded courses in spirituality at universities and medical schools, and offered prizes for inspiring movies and television shows. It bankrolled research into the relationship between prayer and longevity, and into meditation’s effect on the brain. With an endowment of $1.5 billion, the foundation gives out $70 million in grants annually, under the leadership of his son, John Templeton Jr.
Separately, in 1985, Templeton founded the Oxford Centre for Management Studies, a secular institution.

While keeping his hand in the market — he was said to have made a killing by selling short during the Internet bubble of the late 1990s — Templeton also turned to writing books about his spiritual journey. His financial dealings, he held, were one aspect of his “ministry.” Among his titles were “Is God the Only Reality?” (1994) and “Wisdom from the World Religions” (2002).

His goal, he wrote, was to “help hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of people to have spiritual wealth. It’s the most fundamental need that humanity has ever had.”

Templeton had three children with his first wife, who was killed in a moped accident in Bermuda in 1951. He remarried in 1958 to Irene Reynolds Butler, who died in 1993.

In the 1960s, he renounced his American citizenship and settled in Nassau, the Bahamas, where the taxes were low and where he could go swimming in the ocean each morning. His house there was guarded by the recording of a barking dog. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for services to philanthropy in 1987.

In his 1981 book “The Humble Approach,” Templeton formulated what he might have liked as an epitaph.

“Rarely does a conservative become a hero of history,” he wrote. The hero is the unconventional thinker, “one who, according to the accepted customs of his time, might be branded a heretic. It’s the most fundamental need that
humanity has ever had.”