The Serenity Prayer, was first written and, I suppose, first prayed, by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. (He never sought credit or copyright for composing it because he thought copyrighting a prayer was both immoral and kind of silly.)
As Paeth notes, the popular version of the prayer made famous by 12-step programs, includes a few subtle changes to the original.
Here’s the version you’ve probably heard:
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.
And here’s the original:
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 more famous version is shorter and snappier — “wisdom to know the difference” is less clunky than “to distinguish the one from the other.” But it also changes a corporate prayer — “give us the grace …” — to an individual one. And, significantly, it changes “should” to “can” — reducing obligation to possibility.
Niebuhr believed that justice was an obligation whether or not it was a possibility.
Paeth has a good discussion of how this prayer can serve as a distillation of Niebuhr’s theology:
Today, Reinhold Niebuhr is probably best known … [for] 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.
Reinhold Niebuhr, looking like one of his students at Union Seminary didn’t do the reading.
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.
… 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.”
The core of Niebuhr’s theology is essentially Reformed — almost Calvinist in its pessimistic, dismal view of human nature. We humans, he believed, are fallible, finite, fearful, and inclined to selfishness and sin. Where he differs from most Calvinists is that he doesn’t then turn around and project this dismal, pessimistic view onto God.*
His sense of human nature is captured in another of his famous statements, regarding democracy: “Humanity’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but humanity’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
We sinful humans are capable of justice. But we are inclined to injustice. When we humans do not do what justice demands — when we do not change the things that should be changed — it is because our courage has failed, not because God’s limited grace has failed.
I’ve written here about Niebuhr’s conversations with James Baldwin (see here and here). Niebuhr’s view of human sinfulness made him receptive to Baldwin’s indictment of America’s pervasive injustice and systemic racism. Ah, he thought, that is exactly the sort of inclination toward injustice that our Pauline/Augustinian view of human sinfulness teaches we should expect. Such injustice was something that both can and should be changed.
One big project in Niebuhr’s theology was writing the postmortem for post-millennialism — explaining why utopian Christian millennialism failed and will always fail. Our human sinfulness and fallibility, he insisted, meant that utopian schemes were not just doomed, but dangerous, because human benevolence was never going to be a sufficient check on political power. This is why his theology is often described as “Christian realism.”
That phrase has become misleading, causing all sorts of other folks who regard their ideology as “realism” to conscript Niebuhr as a mascot. He thus gets invoked all too often by cynical “realists” who enlist his critique of millennial utopianism to dismiss any and every attempt to make anything more just than it was.
The Serenity Prayer is a good reminder that Niebuhr himself didn’t play that game. Such “realists,” he believed, lacked the courage and the wisdom to change the things they should.
The story is from 1657, when Peter Stuyvesant was governor of the Dutch — and explicitly sectarian Dutch Reformed — colony of New Netherland. There was not yet any United States Constitution because there was not yet any United States. New York City was not yet New York City — although it was about to become that.
Stuyvesant was putting his foot down (singular) on what he called “the sin of religious tolerance,” decreeing a crackdown on the presence in the colony of various infidels such as Jews, Quakers, and Lutherans. He announced a day of mourning and repentance from this alleged sin and a series of new penalties and punishments for anyone who strayed from his extremely narrow sectarian official religion.
The RNS piece has a good summary:
The Flushing Remonstrance was sent by residents of that community (now the Queens borough of New York) to Peter Stuyvesant, the administrator of New Netherland, and condemned his ban of Quaker worship in the Dutch colony.
In 17th-century Colonial America, Flushing stood out in the New World for its tolerance toward religious minorities. In 1645, the Flushing Charter, an agreement between the first English settlers and the Dutch West India Co., granted “liberty of conscience” according to the “custom and manner of Holland” to the new residents of Flushing. The religious openness attracted European immigrants fleeing persecution, including French Huguenots, Swedish Lutherans and Portuguese Jews.
A 1656 ordinance issued by Stuyvesant banned all religious practices outside of the Dutch Reformed Church. Stuyvesant’s ordinance targeted Quaker worship, promising fines and evictions for anyone hosting a Quaker meetinghouse.
As a result, dissent grew in the colony, and a group of 30 Flushing residents, eight of whom were among the 18 English settlers who founded the town, wrote a letter strongly condemning Stuyvesant’s decision. Their Christian beliefs, read the letter, compelled them to stand up against the ordinance.
“We cannot condemn them (Quakers) in this case, neither can we stretch out our hands against them, for out of Christ God is a consuming fire, and it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” state the settlers.
The document lauds the colony’s religious freedom standards as a great Dutch legacy that should be continued.
“The law of love, peace and liberty in the states extending to Jews, Turks and Egyptians, as they are considered sonnes of Adam, which is the glory of the outward state of Holland,” reads the letter.
Again, the colonists who signed this “remonstrance” didn’t have any legal right to object to a decree from their governor. But they did anyway. They told him to get bent, because this is New York and everybody is welcome here.
That was in 1657. A few years later, when one signatory of the letter, John Bowne, allowed Quakers to hold their meetings in his house, Stuyvesant had him arrested and deported.
A couple of years after that, when English ships arrived in the harbor, Stuyvesant called on his people to fight for him to defend New Netherland. They again said No and Stuyvesant was done and old New Amsterdam became New York.
In 1657, Stuyvesant’s authoritarian intolerance was the law of the land and this did not appear to be something that could be changed. But it was something that should be changed. And it was something that was changed by people who found the courage to change it.
God give us the courage to change the things that should be changed.
* That gives Niebuhr a — yes, the word fits — serenity about the sufficiency of God’s grace that eludes TULIP Calvinists. It also makes him more gracious to us dirty, rotten, untrustworthy humans.
If you believe that God is tainted by a totally depraved “holiness” that limits God’s love, God’s mercy, God’s kindness, or God’s justice then you tend to emulate this cruel, stunted-and-stunting “holiness” in your own dealings with sinners. But if you believe that God is actually good, loving, gracious, and just — and that “holy” is not some limit or contradiction of that — then you tend to emulate that attitude toward your fellow sinners.
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