Can Climbing the ‘Divinity Axis’ Help Us Rebuild the American Community?

Revitalizing American communities may require a ‘spiritual’ awakening, broadly conceived, to help alleviate anxiety and foster prosocial behavior.

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About the Authors

Julian Adorney is a columnist at Reality's Last Stand and the founder of Heal the West, a substack movement dedicated to preserving liberalism. He’s also a writer for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR). Find him on X: @Julian_Liberty.

Mark Johnson is a trusted advisor and executive coach at Pioneering Leadership and a facilitator and spiritual men's coach at The Undaunted Man, an organization that helps men embody healthy masculine energy and cultivate path-agnostic spiritual growth. He has over 25 years of experience optimizing people and companies—he writes at The Undaunted Man’s Substack and Universal Principles.

Geoff is a Relationship Architect/Coach, multiple-International Best-Selling Author, Speaker, and Workshop Leader. He has spent the last twenty-eight years coaching people world-wide, with a particular passion for supporting those in relationship, and helping men from all walks of life step up to their true potential. Along with Mark, he is a co-founder of The Undaunted Man.

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Our American community is in decline. In Bowling Alone, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam presents a comprehensive and thoroughly researched argument that our communities have been systematically hollowed out starting around the early 1970s. Putnam published his analysis in 2000, but the rise of social media and Netflix have only exacerbated these trends. In “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy reports that “about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness.” And, he stresses, those numbers are from “before the COVID-19 pandemic cut off so many of us from friends, loved ones, and support systems, exacerbating loneliness and isolation.”

Commentators from Putnam and Murthy to Jonathan Haidt and Alexandra Hudson have extolled the virtues of community and encouraged Americans to engage more actively in their local communities. While these calls are necessary and important, they alone have not been able to reverse the erosion of community life that has unfolded since the 1970s. To supplement these calls, we propose an upstream solution focusing on helping people climb what Haidt refers to as the divinity axis of human life, which may be a key element in revitalizing American communities.

What exactly is the divinity axis?