Serenity Prayer in Yale Alumni Magazine

[Baker, John]

        As I read her response, Elisabeth Sifton essentially makes two
arguments:

        1.      That the Serenity Prayer is essentially oral in its
presentation and circulation, and therefore written sources are a less
than ideal guide to its provenance.  While this is true, it's also true
that written sources are what we have to work with.  The only
alternative would be human memory, and the known principal participants
are all dead.  In any case, memory has been shown to be an extremely
unreliable guide even when we do not have to look back over a period of
more than 70 years.  Fred's research is no different from other cases
where we use historical sources to attempt to divine the origin of a
predominantly oral word or phrase.  Because Fred has done so much work
in this area, Sifton is simply wrong to suggest that it differs from the
traditions with which he is more familiar.

        2.      That the Serenity Prayer is novel and profound, it must
have come from one of the tradition's most gifted practitioners, it is
consistent with Niebuhr's thinking, and it is inconsistent with the
thinking of most other prominent clergymen at the time.  While Fred is,
I think, wrong to say that the prayer's formula is not intellectually
sophisticated, Sifton does not convince me that its novelty and
profundity require that it came from Niebuhr or someone equally gifted
and successful in the field.  There must have been hundreds, probably
thousands, of people who had the background and were in the position to
compose the prayer and to use it publicly in a context where others
would pass it on.  There are any number of "one-hit wonders," where an
author produces a work of brilliance that he is never able to duplicate,
and that seems even more likely when the work is only one sentence long.

        I don't think that there is sufficient evidence at present to
say that Niebuhr did or did not compose the Serenity Prayer.  The
evidence supporting a composition in the early 1940s, as previously held
by Sifton, has now been shown to be overthrown.  Still, Fred himself
presented evidence linking the Serenity Prayer with Niebuhr by 1942,
which is not very long after 1936, the earliest documented example.
What does seem clear is that, whether or not he wrote it, Niebuhr was a
factor in the prayer's dissemination.

        I think it's also significant that the early citations are all
to women, none of whom were clergymen but many of whom (and especially
the earliest) were associated with eleemosynary or educational
institutions.  Consider these datings:

                1936            Syracuse YWCA executive secretary
                1938            superintendent of the Newington Home for
Crippled Children
                1939            home counselor of Oklahoma City's public
schools
                1940            Middlesex, Mass. women's club (speaker's
status unspecified)
                1941            book with two female authors
                1941            Texas state home demonstration agent
                1941            visiting professor at Pennsylvania State
College

        So seven out of seven of the early citations came from women.
For this period, that's not typical.  None of these refer in any way to
a clergyman.  These considerations argue against (though they certainly
do not disprove) an origin with Niebuhr or any other clergyman; they
argue so strongly against propagation through a conventional church
sermon that I think that vector all but disproved.  The initial
propagation, if not necessarily the origin, must have come from some
source to which a YWCA executive secretary, a superintendent of a home
for crippled children, and a highly placed home counselor would have had
access.  Plausible candidates include some sort of conference,
specialized publication, or traveling speaker.

        Fred has my permission to use any part of this that he sees fit.


John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Shapiro, Fred
Sent: Saturday, July 12, 2008 9:42 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Serenity Prayer in Yale Alumni Magazine

I apologize if I don't answer all of the "Serenity Prayer" postings on
this list, but right now I'm at a conference in Portland, Oregon with
limited access to e-mail.   The Yale Alumni Magazine has posted my
article about the SP and the response to it by Reinhold Niebuhr's
daughter:

http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2008_07/serenity.html#neweviden
ce

This presents my position much more fully and carefully than the New
York Times article or the Reuters article.  I would be interested in any
feedback from members of this list as to how compelling or not
compelling my arguments are and Elizabeth Sifton's arguments are.  Such
feedback will help me in answering any future press inquiries.

ADS-Lers will see that the research techniques I use in addressing the
Serenity Prayer origins are the same that I and others on this list have
used in researching word origins.

Fred Shapiro

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