Our Vision
The John Jay Institute envisages leaders of American public life to be men and women of virtue, wisdom, and justice.
Our Mission
The mission of the John Jay Institute is to prepare Christians for principled leadership in public life.
The Need
Within two decades of America's birth John Jay and other founding fathers were alarmed that contemporary currents of unbelief and secularism would become a "political engine" to the ruin of American society and constitutional order. 
In retrospect Jay has been proven prescient. Today American civilization manifests a loss of ethics, mores, manners, civility, and common decency. This cultural crisis is religious and spiritual at its root and stems from the triumph of radical ideologies to sever faith from society, politics, and law. As a consequence Americans are reaping a whirlwind of confusion about the meaning of our civilization, our country, and our selves.
The late Russell Kirk observed how this crisis portends on government and law, "When the religious understanding, from which the concept of law arose in culture, has been discarded or denied, the laws may endure for some time... but in the long run, the laws will be discarded or denied.... I venture to suggest that the corpus of English and American laws ...cannot endure forever unless it is animated by the spirit that moved it in the beginning: that is, by religion, and specifically by the Christian people."
The need is for epoch-making leaders in public life - men and women of principle who are grounded in the Holy Scriptures and formed by the Christian moral and intellectual tradition. Our time calls for leaders in both the commonwealth and the church who possess the full wealth of conviction of the truth of their faith and its implications for the complete flourishing of human civilization, society, politics, and law. Unfortunately, the majority of educational institutions that are tasked with forming the mind and character of our future leaders have capitulated to the prevailing pernicious trends of intellectual, moral, and artistic nihilism. This desperate situation has further compounded the need for leaders with an integrated vision of and for human life and society. Deprived of aspirations for the true, the good, and the beautiful, there is currently a dearth of principled leaders to face the foreboding challenges of the 2lst Century.
