Capitalization, Titles
Q. Dear CMOS, As a religious writer I am struggling with a recent (apparent) change. With the advent of computer spell-checkers, the term “biblical” when referring to the Holy Scriptures is no longer capitalized. Turabian seems to indicate that proper adjectives should be capitalized, whereas even older editions of the Oxford American Unabridged Dictionary (for instance) do not. It would seem to me, since the term “bible” when not capitalized can refer to a number of authoritative books in various fields, that the reference to the Holy Bible as a proper noun should be capitalized in its adjectival form. What say you? Thank you.
A. CMOS does not capitalize “biblical,” and hasn’t as far back as I can check in our library here (the 11th edition, 1949), so I don’t think we can consider this a recent change. Although I’m sure some publications, especially religious ones, would cap it as part of their house style, CMOS tends to lowercase whenever possible. We lowercase the president, the pope, and the queen—words that you will often see capped elsewhere. Even when we uppercase a proper noun, like Congress or Senate, we might lowercase the adjective: congressional or senatorial.
When setting style, we always consider whether a rule will create confusion. Since the word “biblical” is rarely used other than in reference to a book of sacred scriptures, I doubt that readers would misconstrue its meaning, especially in a religious context. If you find that lowercasing it in your writing results in ambiguity, however, then by all means uppercase it.
