Twenty words. God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

That is the prayer, in the form Reinhold Niebuhr eventually settled on. It is recited at meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and the dozens of twelve-step programs that descend from it, several times every minute somewhere in the world. It is one of the most-said modern prayers in any language. For most of the 20th century, no one could prove who wrote it.

The answer is now settled, the evidence is overwhelming, and the long uncertainty was caused by a single editorial oversight in 1943 plus the prayer's own author never bothering to fight for credit.

Here is the story.

Niebuhr in 1943

Reinhold Niebuhr was forty-eight years old and one of the most prominent American theologians of his generation. He had taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York since 1928, written Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), and was in the middle of writing The Nature and Destiny of Man, the Gifford Lectures that would become his most famous book. He preached on Sundays at the small Congregational church in Heath, Massachusetts, where his family summered.

In the summer of 1943, by his own later account and his family's, he wrote a short prayer for the close of a Sunday service. It went something like the form quoted above, with small variations across the times he used it. He gave a copy to a visiting parishioner who asked for one. He did not copyright it, did not publish it under his own name, and did not, at the time, think much about it.

His daughter Elisabeth Sifton, writing about it sixty years later, said her father considered the prayer ordinary work, a Sunday composition like dozens of others he had written. He was not trying to produce a classic. He was writing for the people in front of him on a particular Sunday.

How it got loose

The prayer began to circulate. The visiting parishioner shared it. Then her friends did. By 1944, a version of the prayer had appeared, without attribution, in a publication for federal workers titled the Workers' Defense League Newsletter, and from there in a broader range of pamphlets and devotional materials. Some of these credited it to Niebuhr. Most did not.

In 1942, before the prayer was even written, Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson saw what was probably an earlier version of it in a newspaper obituary clipped by an AA member. The story is well-documented by the AA archivist Mel B. and by Sifton: Wilson liked the prayer, did not know who had written it, and incorporated it into AA literature. By 1955, when the second edition of Alcoholics Anonymous (the "Big Book") was published, the prayer was central to AA practice. It was attributed in early AA texts to "anonymous" or to various candidates including a 14th-century German monk.

This is where the confusion got entrenched. The prayer was famous, it was useful, and it was being attributed to almost anyone except the man who actually wrote it.

The candidates that were not Niebuhr

Several wrong attributions circulated for decades. The most persistent:

None of these survives a careful look at the documentary trail. The earliest verifiable appearances of the prayer in its modern form, in any language, date from 1942 to 1944, and all of them trace back to Niebuhr's Heath, Massachusetts congregation.

The Sifton documentation

In 2003 Elisabeth Sifton, Niebuhr's daughter and a longtime publishing editor at Knopf, published The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War. The book is partly a memoir, partly a defense of her father's authorship. It contains the documentary trail Sifton had assembled over years: her father's own papers, correspondence with the Heath parishioner, the AA archival material, the German translation records, and the surrounding family memory.

The book closed the question. Scholars writing about the prayer after 2003, including the historian Fred Shapiro of Yale Law School (who had previously published a 2008 Yale Alumni Magazine article casting doubt on Niebuhr's authorship), have accepted the Sifton documentation as definitive. Shapiro himself published a 2014 retraction acknowledging that Niebuhr's authorship is supported by the evidence Sifton presented.

The credit is now settled in the standard reference works. The Yale Book of Quotations and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations both attribute the prayer to Niebuhr, 1943.

Why Niebuhr did not fight for credit

He was asked. He never seemed to care much. By the time the prayer was famous, in the 1950s and 60s, Niebuhr was already a major public intellectual whose theological work he considered more important than a short Sunday prayer. He gave permission for AA to use it. He confirmed authorship when directly asked. He did not pursue copyright. He did not write about it as one of his significant works.

This is one of the more striking things about the story. The man who wrote one of the most-recited prayers of the 20th century treated it as a minor piece of work. The reason it became famous is not that he promoted it. The reason it became famous is that people in difficult situations found that it helped.

There is something theologically appropriate about this. The Christian tradition has tended to treat prayer as a thing that does its work in the lives of those who say it, not in the reputation of those who write it. The Serenity Prayer is one of the clearest modern examples.