Historians cannot make up their minds regarding the personal faith of Thomas Tallis. During his lifetime and career, his native English worship shifted from Catholic to Anglican Catholic to vernacular Anglican to Catholic again, and finally to a more tolerant Anglican service under the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Tallis served each administration well with new—or adapted—compositions, and the most common assertion is that even if his heart were Catholic (he did, after all, stand as Catholic Godfather to William Byrd's son), Tallis remained a very successful pragmatist. Thus each of his compositions tends toward a careful reflection of the prevailing winds—both doctrinal and stylistic—of its time. A simple votive antiphon in Latin such as his Sancte Deus almost certainly belongs to the 1530s, when Latin remained the language for worship in the English church, but musical and stylistic changes verged toward simpler and more direct expression of a liturgical text. In fact, the later reign of Henry VIII favored all such shorter and more direct votive antiphons, setting texts such as Sancte Deus, which speak directly to Jesus or the Blessed Virgin.

The text of Tallis' Sancte Deus, indeed, is a passionate pastiche of Christocentric fragments. The first three evocations ("Holy God, Holy strength, Holy and immortal one, have mercy upon us") comes from an ancient Greek prayer to Christ, appropriated by the Catholic Church for Holy Week; another well-known section of text quotes the Holy Week chant Adoramus te, Christe, "You Who through your cross redeemed the world." Tallis sets this text in a highly personal manner, proceeding almost completely in intimate chordal writing that effectively unites the four voices in one prayer. Each brief phrase opens with imitation at a very short distance, proceeds in a more homophonic vein, and quickly reaches a strong cadence. Unfortunately, for all the composer's passion, his youth as a musician shows in the high number of sudden cross-relations and awkward vocal leaps.

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