Let’s start giving God his due

Earlier this year, I was interviewed for a news article about what it’s like to be a conservative living among liberals. I made the point that at every neighborhood cookout, a local liberal would introduce himself or herself, then begin asking questions about what I did for a living.

“And it’s like, ‘Oh god, here we go,’” the story quoted me as saying.

The quote is accurate, except for one detail. I was referencing “God,” not “god.” The Lord. The Creator. The Holy Ghost. The Holy Spirit. Yahweh. Allah. The Dude in the Clouds.

It has become increasingly popular to use the lowercase “god” to refer to the singular deity central to so many faiths. Perhaps this is out of ignorance; maybe it’s simply because we more heavily communicate with each other through the written word on social media. When we used to communicate verbally, capitalization wasn’t an issue.

But it seems that, more often, not capitalizing “God” is a statement about the author. If one doesn’t believe in God, he or she often will think it’s fine to disrespect those who do by dropping the “G” to lowercase. Such a stylistic change is a small way of taking sides in a dispute that spanned centuries and caused much blood to be shed — and yet it now can be done not with a sword, but in comfortable pajamas.

But rules are rules. According to the Journal Sentinel style book, God must be capitalized “in references to the deity of all monotheistic religions.” The lowercase “god” is only used in reference to gods and goddesses of polytheistic religions.

It is thus not in the power of a writer to determine whether “God” deserves capitalization or not. When you see someone on Twitter declare “Oh my god,” they are almost certainly not adherents to Norse mythology. It may still happen, but we have yet to declare Thor’s and Loki’s birthdays national holidays.

No, when people punctuate an assertion with the word “god,” they’re talking about my guy. The notorious G-O-D. And when monotheistic believers named their deity, they called him “God.”

This reason alone justifies the capital “G,” even if you believe a single deity to be fictional. “God” is a proper name, just like “Buzz Lightyear” or “Darth Vader.” Even if I don’t believe there’s a singing jungle animal named Baloo, capitalizing his name remains a bare necessity.

Doing otherwise is simply a disrespectful finger in the eye of believers. As Richard Eskow noted last year in Salon — a website that is itself no bastion of right-wingery — refusing to capitalize “God” “makes the writer seem petty and silly, like those Republicans on Fox News who talk about the “Democrat” Party.

As people take religion less seriously, this will increase. According to a 2014 Pew poll, Americans who consider themselves religiously unaffiliated jumped from 16% to 23% in the last seven years. Sixtyseven percent of those age 60 and above considered religion an important part of their lives, while only 38% of those born after 1990 thought that.

But even if you’re not religious, if your goal is truly to “Coexist,” then pay proper respect to the capital “G.” And if you’re looking to spice up your interjection, for the love of God, keep our deity out of it.