What are the boundaries of blasphemy?
Christian Nationalists get in a tizzy about blasphemy, but they have a difficult time defining its boundaries. Is it blasphemous to shout “Jesus Christ” when you bang your knee against your desk? What about Christmas practices that blend beliefs in magical reindeer with stories about the sacrificial baby Jesus?
For Patricia Lage, the boundaries of blasphemy are clear. For Lage, the clear and present danger of blasphemy is the infiltration of fortune cookies into American culture.
According to Patricia Lage, whenever Christians get Chinese food, they are committing a grave sin, because fortune cookies come along with take-out Chinese meals. Fortune cookies are witchcraft, according to Lage.
To be fair, it isn’t just fortune cookies that are the work of evil witches, according to Lage. She also believes that yoga, trick-or-treating, and Catholic rosary beads are forms of demonic witchcraft.
We might laugh off this strange belief that fortune cookies are an evil creation of present-day American witches. Unfortunately, Patricia Lage is a spiritual advisor to Donald Trump, and is a major political ally of the Trump for President campaign who helped Trump claim victory in the Iowa caucuses of 2024.
Donald Trump has bragged about the connection he has with Patricia Lage through the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition, an organization through which Lage coordinated with Trump in the weeks prior to the 2024 Iowa caucuses.
