Emoji Dei

Religious Iconography in the Digital Age

Abstract

A recent proposal to create a hijab emoji raises interesting questions about the place of "religion" among the colorful pictographs that increasingly punctuate our texts, emails, and social media posts. In this exploratory article, we offer some preliminary – and, of necessity, inchoate – reflections on religious representation in the digital age and outline possible avenues of research for colleagues and students to pursue. Of crucial importance, we argue, are what religiously-themed emoji might suggest about the default world in which they operate; a default, we submit, that functions to affirm the normative ascendance of the secular.