Reinhold Niebuhr

Reinhold Niebuhr trained at Yale Divinity School and served for over a decade as a pastor in industrial Detroit before moving into academic life at Union Theological Seminary in 1928, an experience of ministering among factory workers that shaped his lifelong suspicion of theology written without regard for economic and political power. His 1932 book Moral Man and Immoral Society argued that individuals are capable of a degree of unselfishness that groups, nations and classes essentially are not, so that political ethics has to reckon with collective self interest as a permanent fact rather than a problem moral persuasion alone can solve. He developed this position further across the following decade, culminating in his 1939 Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, published as The Nature and Destiny of Man, which set out what came to be called Christian realism, a position that took human sinfulness seriously as a check on utopian politics of both the political left and right without abandoning Christian hope altogether.

Richard Wightman Fox's biography traces how this stance made Niebuhr an influential voice in American public life well beyond seminary walls, read and consulted by politicians and journalists who did not share his theology but found his account of power, self interest and moral limitation useful for thinking about depression era economics, fascism and, later, the Cold War.

The prayer beginning God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference is generally attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr, most often dated to a sermon he gave at a small church in Heath, Massachusetts, sometime in the early 1940s, though Niebuhr himself gave varying and imprecise accounts of exactly when he first wrote it. The attribution was seriously questioned in later decades after researchers turned up earlier printed uses of similar wording that predated Niebuhr's supposed composition of it, raising the possibility that he had adapted rather than originated the prayer, or that the timeline of his own recollection was simply unreliable.

Subsequent research has on balance supported Niebuhr as the prayer's actual author, tracing the disputed earlier printings to sources that likely themselves derived from Niebuhr's own use of the prayer in the 1930s and 1940s rather than preceding it. Whatever the precise date, the prayer spread far beyond Niebuhr's own theological readership after Alcoholics Anonymous adopted a version of it for use in twelve step meetings beginning in the 1940s, and it has since become one of the most widely recognized short prayers in American religious life, known to many people who have never read a page of Niebuhr's formal theology.