Serenity Prayer

The Serenity Prayer belongs to Reinhold Niebuhr, but establishing that took a scholarly detective story. Niebuhr, the American Protestant theologian, used the prayer in preaching from around the 1930s and 1940s, allowed it to be printed, and regarded it as his own, while remarking that it may have been spooking around for years. His daughter Elisabeth Sifton's 2003 book placed its composition in a 1943 sermon at Heath, Massachusetts.

In 2008 the quotation scholar Fred Shapiro published newspaper and archive findings showing versions of the prayer in print through the 1930s, sometimes unattributed and sometimes credited to others, and suggested Niebuhr might have absorbed rather than authored it, a challenge that drew wide attention and a firm response from Sifton.

The story then turned again. Continuing database searches surfaced earlier printings that did credit Niebuhr, including one from 1937 describing the prayer as his, and in a 2014 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education Shapiro reported that the new evidence had changed his mind, concluding that Niebuhr most likely did originate the prayer. That is where scholarship rests, an attested attribution with an honest history of doubt attached, and the episode is itself instructive, a model case of how a famous text's origin can be tested rather than assumed.

The prayer's enormous reach owes less to its author than to its adopters. In 1941 a member of the young Alcoholics Anonymous fellowship noticed the prayer in a New York newspaper obituary, and the group's New York office was struck by how exactly it fitted their programme. Cards were printed, the prayer entered the fellowship's meetings and literature, and it has opened or closed twelve step gatherings ever since, recited by millions of people who could not name its author.

The fellowship's common wording, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference, is a first person singular petition, while Niebuhr's own later printed version asks God to give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, a congregational form with grace at its head, and the differences mark the text's passage from sermon to folk prayer.

During the Second World War the prayer circulated among service members and chaplains, and the United Service Organizations distributed it in printed form. Its afterlife has been boundless, on cards, plaques, medallions and needlework, in pastoral counselling and popular culture alike, because its three petitions compress a whole practical theology, the limits of control, the duty of action, and the difficulty of telling the two apart.