The Serenity Prayer, Written and Questioned

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.