Late-Stage Babylon: Navigating the Post-Secular Spiritual Crisis

by Angie Speaks

With a blend of scholarly analysis and personal reflection, this book invites readers to contemplate the complexities of our modern spiritual landscape.

In today's world, something strange is Celebrities like Kat Von D and Russell Brand are embracing Catholicism, finding allure in its newfound status as a counter-cultural symbol among media personalities, influencers and the literati. Tech titans like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are shirking the rationalist modus-operandi, making open allusions to the arcane, and even funding research into occult phenomena. U.S. senators stumble over their words in front of the watchful lenses of establishment news cameras and journalists, grappling with the notion of the potential existence of superintelligent life — which, if real,  would shatter the fabric of our rationalist paradigm.

This unexpected shift raises pressing What is driving these influential individuals in secular liberal democracies to embrace ancient religious institutions,  fringe mysticism, and what only a decade ago would have been ridiculed as conspiracy? Why are they turning away from rationalism, the cornerstone of modern thought?

Late-Stage Babylon delves into this post-secular spiritual crisis, offering insights and guidance in navigating these turbulent swings of the spiritual pendulum. Drawing inspiration from the works of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, this book seeks to unravel the underlying motivations behind this cultural shift and its potential implications for the future.

From the heights of celebrity culture to the cutting edge of technological innovation, society is grappling with a profound spiritual hunger that traditional rationalist paradigms are failing to satisfy. As we enter a new age where the arcane and the obscure hold sway, Late-Stage Babylon serves as a guide, illuminating the path forward in the murky territory that's been brought about by the resurgence of long-dormant forces in the collective psyche.

144 pages, Paperback

Published November 11, 2025

Reviews

[William Harkey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Angie's book is Jung's Man's Search for Meaning for the 21st century. I've followed Angie's intellectual trajectory for some time, and I'm happy to see a culmination of her ideas, sharpened with age and wisdom, now written down. The book takes the full weight of our cultural moment and holds it up to the deeper, older light of the psyche itself. Angie performs Jungian field work on the collective unconscious of the authoritarian/internet/AI age, grounded in her own disillusionment, and this kind of autobiographical honesty gives the theoretical architecture a pulse it wouldn't otherwise have. As someone whose scholarly work draws on the work of Ernest Becker, I found myself in constant, productive conversation with this text. Where Becker diagnoses our immortality projects as responses to mortality terror, Angie diagnoses our ideological possessions, our tech-utopian fantasies, our spiritual cosplay, as responses to shadow denial. These are two hands reaching into the same malaise from different angles.

And the prose deserves attention, because Angie is such an eloquent and forceful writer. She can move from the autobiographical particular (a little girl in a warehouse Pentecostal church, breathing in the sweat of broken prayers) to the mythic and archetypal in a single paragraph, and the shift never feels forced. She writes with the philosophical seriousness of a scholar and the tempo of someone who learned language first through song, through rhythm.

In the end, Angie's book asks you to take the soul seriously, and it does so in a voice that earns the authority to make that ask.

[Eric Arnold · Rating 2 out of 5]

I used to listen to the author's old podcast with Peter Coffin a lot and was not expecting it to be great due to her post-left turn during COVID, but I like it when people yammer about Jung and Angie is good at that, so I gave it a read. Her main thesis was interesting and deserves a good book written about it . The desacralized postmodern world is devoid of meaning or the numinous, so people seek it out in often horrible ways. However, I'm unconvinced this wasn't heavily co-"written" by AI. The ideas are Angie's own, but paragraphs are all too often punctuated by "it's not __, it's __" declarations and the telltale em dash. It becomes maddening less than halfway in. It sucks because I know she has it in her and that she can write and clearly get her point across verbally. Read Mark Fisher or something instead of this.

[Em]

Thank you to NetGalley and Repeater Books for the opportunity to review a digital ARC.

While the book did not align with my expectations, I appreciate the author’s effort to blend personal narrative with cultural and psychological inquiry. Readers with an interest in Jungian theory, modern spirituality, or the influence of religious experience on identity formation may find it valuable. I recognize the author’s intent to contribute meaningfully to ongoing conversations about belief and self-understanding.

[Zach Posnik]

Horrific book, really poorly written with very few true examples. Really suffers from the ‘show don’t tell’ phenomenon. UFO chapter was the most compelling but I think this could have used a better editor.