The Serenity Prayer

Niebuhr's c. 1943 short prayer — adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous and the wider twelve-step tradition

Tradition: American Christian realism / Protestant devotional / twelve-step tradition

Niebuhr's c. 1943 Serenity Prayer — 'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change'

Composed by Niebuhr in 1932 or 1933 (the exact date is debated; Niebuhr later said he had been using a version of it for years before he wrote it down) and first used as the conclusion to a sermon Niebuhr preached at the Heath Evangelical Church in Heath, Massachusetts, in summer 1934, the Serenity Prayer is one of the most-quoted Christian prayers of the twentieth century. The standard wording: '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.' The prayer's first widely-circulated documentary appearance was in the 1944 Federal Council of Churches' 'A Book of Prayers for the Armed Forces' (Niebuhr served on the editorial committee). Alcoholics Anonymous adopted a version of the prayer in 1942 (the AA version originally read 'O God, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other') and made it central to the twelve-step recovery tradition; through AA the prayer has reached cultural circulation far beyond Niebuhr's specifically Christian-realist context. The prayer has been continuously misattributed (to St Francis of Assisi, Boethius, Marcus Aurelius, Reinhold Niebuhr's wife Ursula); the most thorough scholarly investigation (Elisabeth Sifton, 'The Serenity Prayer', 2003 — Sifton was Niebuhr's daughter) establishes the Niebuhr authorship and dates. The prayer compresses Niebuhr's mature Christian-realist sensibility — acceptance of finitude, courageous action where action is possible, practical wisdom in distinguishing — into three short clauses.