Midge Ure writes a ‘Dear God’ letter; a song on the line from They Might Be Giants; Tracie Spencer, 13, a real teen.

Pop radio has suddenly become a prime medium for addressing deity. First there was XTC’s less-than-reverent “Dear God,” a hostile open letter to a nonexistent Supreme Being and a bitter tract of faithlessness in a hostile universe.

Now, somewhat less abrasively and more commercially, comes the first American solo hit from Midge Ure: a more upbeat anthem also titled “Dear God”--strictly coincidence, according to Ure.

“The XTC thing?” said the unfailingly polite Scotsman, on a recent visit to town. “I wasn’t aware of it at all until last week. The record company played me a cassette of it. It’s a very good song. It’s a bit more cynical than mine, but a similar sort of sentiment, except mine was more questioning and theirs was a bit more sort of a statement .”

Indeed, whereas XTC’s attitude was defiantly atheistic, Ure comes off as hopefully agnostic, petitioning the God Who May Be There for “a worldwide religion . . . hope for the children . . . peace in a restless world.”

It’s not a surprising posture, given that Ure was the co-writer with Bob Geldof of the original charity sing-along, Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” and a prime mover behind the Live Aid and FreedomFest benefit concerts.

Not that he thinks this request for a “worldwide religion” is in any danger of being delivered soon.

“It’s a tall order,” he admitted. “I’ve a real problem with religion. I find it very, very bizarre that someone’s god is better than anybody else’s god so they end up killing each other over it.

“Where I come from, there’s a real inbred bigotry. Glasgow’s very similar to Belfast. You don’t choose your religion, you’re born into it. And I thought that everyone in Britain felt the same way--like a Catholic girl couldn’t marry into a Protestant boy’s family, and a Catholic football team couldn’t have a Protestant player. It wasn’t until I moved away that I realized that not everybody felt that way.”

More such weighty world topics are to be found on Ure’s second solo album, “Answers to Nothing.” The reasons for his heightened consciousness? “I don’t think that the whole Band Aid/Live Aid saga started me off on all the things that I’ve written about on the album. But having a baby certainly did. I never particularly worried about (world problems) for myself or for other people, but there’s a whole new responsibility that I never dreamed of before, and you do start to worry.”