There's a Devil emoji for far-right anti-woke warriors, these rightious believers need a God emoji

 

By Hal Brown

This blog was inspired by this article in Media Matters:

Excerpt:

Last year, Trump ally and provocateur Roger Stone even claimed that a “Satanic portal” had opened over the White House after President Joe Biden took office. 

This sort of framing, which posits that political enemies are literal “demons” waging a “spiritual war,” stems largely from a right-wing Christian movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation. For years, the NAR movement has reportedly sought “to take dominion over politics, business and culture in preparation for the end times and the return of Jesus.” Rolling Stone described the core NAR belief in spiritual war in a profile of one of the movement’s leading figures, commentator and self-proclaimed prophet Lance Wallnau:

NAR followers like Wallnau believe that America is specially anointed by God to project Christianity across the globe. And the NAR movement’s followers view foes of their quest as satanic. This is not metaphorical. They hold that the physical world is enveloped by a supernatural dimension, featuring warring angels and demons, and are convinced that demons afflict their enemies on behalf of the devil. The movement holds that these spiritual battles are reflected in earthly politics. As the late NAR founder C. Peter Wagner explained in a striking NPR interview in 2011: “I believe there’s a lot of demonic control over Congress … that needs to be dispersed.”

Fiery rhetoric of a spiritual war coupled with demonization of opponents has created an atmosphere in which violence appears permissible and justifiable to followers. For instance, the violence at the Capitol on January 6 was largely undergirded and inspired by boisterous cries of spiritual warfare from prominent figures on the religious right — including Wallnau — who have conditioned their audiences to consider political violence a legitimate tactic. 

Because there are so many people who not only believe that God is real also believe that the Devil and his demons are real I thought that it was time for God to have His own emoji.

The Devil got his emoji in 2010.

The world got a little more mischievous in 2010 when the Smiling Face With Horns emoji 😈 was approved on Unicode 6.0. It’s commonly called the Devil or Happy Devil emoji.

On most platforms, the Smiling Face With Horns emoji 😈 depicts a purple face with devil horns. Microsoft still features a red-faced devil, as did Google and Samsung until they brought the style of their emoji more in line with Apple’s smiley devil in 2017.

Regardless of style, the emoji is suggestive of a prankster or naughty, naughty person. Reference.

I don't remember an uproar in the evangelical community when the Devil was so honored.  There are over 3,600 emojis, so many that this list page takes a long time to load.  No specific people have an emoji and as far as I can tell the Devil is the only entity that has one.

My hunch is that the Big Guy Down Under was more than pleased that this slipped by fairly unnoticed. After all, the closest emoji Big Guy in the Sky got  to having an emoji depicting him (or Him) is 😇 sometimes used with the praying hands, 🙏 which are often used to illustrate worhiping God.

You can find references to God on Twitter using several emojis. Below are  examples:

There's no emoji specifically for God. There aren't any for Jesus either. There are emoji for various religions, for example ✝, ✝️, ✡, and ☪️.

The two most well-known images of God are Michelangelo's Creation of Adam" from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and "God the Father" by Cima da Conegliano. 

Neither was made into an emoji. The later could be easily made into an emoji.

It could look something like this...

By Hal Brown