Decapitalizing "Thou"

By Ed Piper

Something else on the King's English contained in hymns and retained in the RSV translation of the Bible (see previous blog entry): Back around my seminary years in the 1990's, I typed all the hymns I sang with lower-case "t" in "thou", "thee", and so forth.

I had two reasons: One, I wanted to make my personal Hymnbook lyric sheets (I personally typed the many pages I still use) useful for my worship in private. Two, my preference at that stage of my Christian life was not capitalizing those words. It seemed stilted, stuffy, archaic.

Not capitalizing "thee" and "thou" (the former used as an object, the latter in the nominative case as subject) was in no way designed to dishonor God. You could figure that.

In more recent years, I re-typed my (many) pages of lyrics from the 1955 hymnal of my youth restoring capital "t"'s in each use of "thou" and "thee" (as well as "thy" and "thine", the former an adjective, the latter used as an object, a pronoun) in the hymns.

I had gotten over my earlier reaction to the perceived stiltedness of the language. I also had a thought: To some people, including some older Christians, it's probably pretty important that these references to God are capitalized. Why not just go with capital letters?

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