He subsequently rushed over to the recording studio located at the bottom of his garden to get these musical ideas on tape.

For the song's lyrical content, Ure centered the central theme around the weaponization of religion for acts of violence, saying that he found it both "bizarre" and "obscene" that "staunch radical people will happily kill somebody else because they don't believe in the same God".

[4] Ure recorded "Dear God" without knowing that XTC had released a song with the same title a few years prior.

He only learned of the song's existence in early 1989 after his record company sent him a cassette containing the XTC track.

"[4] Tom Demalon of AllMusic thought that "Dear God" was Ure's best attempt at assessing the state of the world on his album Answers to Nothing.