I’m not sure when I first encountered the Serenity Prayer, or when it first occurred to me to ask who wrote it. For much of my life it never occurred to me that prayers were the kind of things that people actually wrote down, especially something as popular as the Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to tell the difference.”

This simple, powerful sentence has been reprinted on everything from key chains and coffee mugs to tattoos and tea towels. For many people, it is probably most closely associated with 12-step recovery programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous. There, the prayer serves as a reminder both of human limits and of the fact that they do not define us.

Originally, however, the prayer was written by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. For him, it was a call to confront the realities of the world with courage – relying not on one’s own power but on God’s grace.

Christian realism

Over the years, the prayer has often been attributed to other Christian writers, including Thomas Aquinas, Augustine and Francis of Assisi. Many people might be surprised to discover that, far from being penned in an ancient European monastery, the Serenity Prayer was written less than a century ago in a cottage in western Massachusetts.

Niebuhr was born the son of a German American pastor in Wright City, Missouri. He became a pastor himself, serving a congregation in Detroit before moving to New York to teach at Union Theological Seminary, where he gained recognition as a theologian, activist and social critic. His brother, H. Richard Niebuhr, also became a well-known ethicist and theologian, as did his sister Hulda.

Today, Reinhold Niebuhr is probably best known as a founder of “Christian realism.” As I describe in my book “The Niebuhr Brothers for Armchair Theologians,” it is an approach to ethics grounded in the insight that human beings are called to strive toward their highest moral ideals, while recognizing our inability to fully achieve them.

This idea is captured by the title of one of his best-known books, “Moral Man and Immoral Society.” There Niebuhr argued that, while individuals are sometimes capable of acting purely from love for others, groups are not. When human beings form collectives, those collectives are ultimately capable of acting only from self-interest.

Therefore, the most that can be expected from any society is not love but justice – which approximates, but never fulfills, the demands of love.

Over the years, Niebuhr’s thought became particularly influential in politics. His work was read and respected by liberal politicians such as Arthur Schlesinger and Hubert Humphrey, who was vice president under Lyndon B. Johnson. Some of these admirers had little use for his religion, and even dubbed themselves “atheists for Niebuhr,” but they respected and embraced his insights into society.

2 versions

How then did Niebuhr come to write this prayer?

His daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, recounts the story in her book “The Serenity Prayer.” She was a girl when Niebuhr first composed the lines for a worship service near their summer home in Heath, Massachusetts. Later, as she tells it, he contributed a version to a prayer book for soldiers being shipped off to fight in World War II, and from there it eventually migrated to Alcoholics Anonymous.

Niebuhr did not believe that prayers should be copyrighted, she writes, and never profited from its popularity – though friends would gift him with examples of Serenity Prayer kitsch, such as wood carvings and needlework.

Yet the best-known version of the prayer is not quite the version that Niebuhr originally wrote. According to Sifton, his first version read, “God, give us the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, the courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”

The differences between the two versions are subtle but significant, emphasizing themes that were central to Niebuhr’s thought. He did not simply pray for serenity, but for grace. He did not pray for courage to change what can be changed, but only for what should be changed.

And crucially, it is not an individual prayer, but collective: “grant us,” not “grant me.” Niebuhr believed that while the highest moral achievements could be attained only by individuals, constructive social change was possible only by working together for justice.

‘Saved by hope’

The Serenity Prayer in all of its forms rests on Niebuhr’s hard-won sense of history’s tragic dimension, borne of his experience of two world wars and a global depression. He recognized that even the most courageous actions are not guaranteed to succeed.

But Niebuhr was no fatalist and did not believe uncertainty was a reason not to act. On the contrary, he believed that as human beings we are obligated to enter the fray of social conflict – not with an arrogant sense of our own superiority, but with a humble recognition of our limits.

As he wrote elsewhere: “Nothing worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.”

In the end, for Niebuhr, it is God’s grace that determines the final course of history, rather than our own actions – enabling us to accept the reality that the outcomes of our actions are often out of our hands.

Scott Paeth does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.