Songfacts®:

• In this poignant country song, Vassar sings from the perspective of God looking down on His creation and being disappointed at all of the hatred and violence in the world. He begs people to consider the consequences of their actions and to choose love and peace over hate and violence. Vassar wrote the tune a year after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US.
  
  "I was on an airplane when I wrote that song [in 2002], and I was reading all this news. I was like, What in the world is going on?" he recalled in a 2018 Songfacts interview. "Even today, it's very poignant because everything going on in the world today, you just shake your head and go, What in the hell is wrong with us? It's like it just keeps getting worse. People hate each other more and society has just turned into a joke, and it's unfolding before our eyes. I think out of desperation or out of exasperation I wrote it."
• Sony music executive Joe Galante was so passionate about the song, he re-released American Child to include the track, which wasn't on the original 2002 release. "Joe Galante loved 'This Is God,'" Vassar recalled. "He said, 'Phil, this song moves me in a way that I can't even explain.' The label took the expense to do that and that says a lot about him, how passionate he was about his artists and about his music, and about our music."
  
  But execs like Galante are a rare breed in a greedy industry. Vassar explained: "You don't see that much anymore. It's all about money. Everybody cares about what sells, they don't care about what's good. It's more about what's gonna move the needle back. They just want to make money and I get it - I understand capitalism and all of that, I went to college and studied business, but I don't know where that's gonna leave us. At some point it's going to be a whole lot of really bad music. But who knows, I'm not an expert - I just write songs and get to sing 'em. That's all I can do."
• In the music video, helmed by Deaton-Flanigen, Vassar walks along a road and passes by people from all different walks of life who are struggling in a broken world. "It was like 20 degrees in Nashville that day," he recalls of the shoot. "A few people actually got frostbite. It was freezing cold, and I tell you what, to me it's the best video I've ever done. It's powerful in the way they did that. George Flanigen was the one who shot that video, but it was just like, man."
• This peaked at #17 on the Country chart.