Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . WEB EXCLUSIVE . Interview with Elisabeth Sifton . January 9, 2004

"God give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other," wrote Reinhold Niebuhr one Sunday morning before leading the summer service in a small New England church.

Read an interview with editor and book publisher Elisabeth Sifton, author of THE SERENITY PRAYER: FAITH AND POLITICS IN TIMES OF PEACE AND WAR (Norton, 2003), a memoir of her father Reinhold Niebuhr and a meditation on the meaning of his famous prayer.

Q: You have written the "back story" to the Serenity Prayer. What did war have to do with writing the prayer in the 1940s, and what might war have to do with its meaning today?

Photo of Elisabeth Sifton

A: The prayer has become so famous because of its association with Alcoholics Anonymous as a personal prayer, spoken in the first person singular. That's a wonderful way to use the prayer, a fine way, but I felt it was important to remember that it was written originally in the first person plural at the height of the Second World War. In the summer of 1943, when it was written, it was not at all sure that the Allies would win the war. It had been going on for years. It had gone on for two full years before the United States even joined in the war -- a cause that my father was deeply involved in and cared about. It wasn't clear how long it would take to win the war. I felt that a person such as the author of this prayer, an active clergyman and teacher and pastor and writer who had been working on issues of social justice and collective concerns about the community, could not but have these thoughts in mind when writing such a prayer. It would be inconceivable for a clergyman not to think of these things when composing such words in 1943. There was terrible pain and loss and grief that we all sustained in our private lives, but surely we as a community, as a city, as a village like the village my father wrote the prayer for, or as a country were suffering unimaginable grief and loss in 1943. Some of it was very hard to accept. There were conditions, not only the wartime conditions but conditions in our own country of social injustice and economic disparities, of difficult racial problems, all of which had concerned my father for many decades. It is inconceivable to me that he wouldn't have had these in mind as well, as he wrote a prayer like this. The question of when to decide what to do, trying to have the wisdom to decide whether to try to change something or to accept it, was something that had been occupying everybody throughout the 1930s and 1940s. When do we decide to get involved in this war, for example, was a subject that had taken the United States two full years to answer. So it seemed to me that it was germane.

This is very much the situation today. It's not similar; it's comparable. We have comparable difficulties -- not the same difficulties, but our difficulties today are to figure out this strange world, which is neither peace nor war. The United States sustained a terrific attack on 9/11, which was not like a war. It was a crime, of course, a terrible crime. But it felt also a bit like a war. We have been asked to respond to it as if it were a war, but there is no clear indication of exactly who is the enemy, or where he or she is to be found. And we are asked to respond to this situation in new ways. We are being asked to change, in some ways. On the other hand, we are being asked to accept things and not change them. It seems to me the question of what we're going to accept -- we as a collective, we Americans, or we New Yorkers, or we people of Massachusetts, or whatever it may be -- what we are being asked to change or to accept should be asked anew every single day, just the way Alcoholics Anonymous people ask it anew every single day individually.

Q: Both Reinhold Niebuhr and his brother, H. Richard Niebuhr, wrote prayers. Could you say something about their relationship and about their prayer writing?

A: They were both great writers of prayer. They were very fond of each other, and they were very close. My father and his younger brother (by the way, they had another brother who was not a theologian), who was also a theologian, were close not only in their work but in their lives, although they lived in different cities and had very different temperaments in some respects. They were very dear to each other. They corresponded closely about many things -- about their families, about their work, and about theology. That correspondence, which would throw light on how they talked to each other, is not to be found anywhere. Although I have my childhood memories of how they were in the room together -- that I have vivid memories of -- I don't have very much more than that to go on. I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment on their differing ways of praying, although I have read what both of them have written about prayer, and I could do exegetical analysis of these, but in no expert way.

Q: You say that your father wrote that the only time the church is really sufferable is when it is at prayer. Could you say more about what he meant?

A: I had the impression when I was growing up that he didn't find very many churches or church services, or church behavior in the collective, institutional sense, sufferable. He found an awful lot of church people to be pompous, full of themselves, interested in, concerned with, absorbed by issues of personal or institutional aggrandizement, whether of this kind or that. He was rather anticlerical himself in his general tone and demeanor. He made that remark at the end of a long conference, the founding conference in 1948 in Amsterdam of the World Council of Churches, a group that is supposed to be the churches all getting together to say that they all are on the same page about the importance of the Christian message being expressed in our social, political, spiritual, and ecclesiastical lives. But all they had done for two weeks was squabble. They had squabbled over issues not of fundamental theological importance, but over issues of relative power, money, influence, prestige. That's tiresome and boring. He was fed up with that. However, toward the end of the conference, they finally arranged to have a service which all of them could attend, which itself had taken weeks to do, at which all of them would feel comfortable praying together. I think this is both grotesquely funny and terribly sad -- sad that it took so long. But that service moved him, because it was a real service of true, devout, good people -- bishops from this country and that, nonconformist ministers and Orthodox priests, all together praying. That he found fine. It's so sad that it should be thus.

Q: The simple summer church services in Heath, Massachusetts, where he wrote the Serenity Prayer, must have moved him.

A: Those were fine, and there were many other simple services that did. He conducted services at Union Theological Seminary many times -- small ones, big ones. And he had been a working pastor for twelve years, fourteen years. Any service that he participated in, he took seriously and did not mock. He didn't mock the services or the efforts to have a real service. He wasn't a mocking kind of person. He found tiresome not the services themselves, but institutional behavior of a preening, bureaucratic type.

Q: There is great appreciation in your book for the Protestant hymn. Was that his as well as your own? Were hymns important to him in the same sense that prayer was?

A: I think probably not, although he certainly liked them. I believe that I can remember him as he walked down the aisle behind the other ministers and the choir, singing them completely off-key because he had no sense of pitch or tune. I think he liked them, but I don't think he paid too much attention to them. My own enthusiasm for hymns, I think, came from my mother, who was more musically inclined. But I think he would have agreed, or gone along with, or certainly supported the notion that congregational singing, which is a kind of collective prayer on the part of the congregation, is a very good thing. He certainly preferred that to anthems sung by a choir alone, which was a very Anglican thing that he thought was boring.

Q: You say he was not a major religious leader in America -- that he had relatively few invitations to preach anywhere beyond college and university chapels.

A: That's right. He didn't have institutional leadership positions in the church. The people who did didn't like him. It's that simple. They were very establishment people. They thought he was much too left-wing and trouble-making. After all, the Archbishop of York (he became Archbishop of Canterbury), William Temple, had said when he met him, "At last I have met the disturber of my peace." Now, Archbishop Temple and he became good friends, but the fact was my father had a reputation for stirring up controversy, because he would criticize the churches for not doing enough to attend to what he thought should be the first issues for any Christian pastor: poverty, suffering, difficulty of any kind in any sector of the population which wasn't being looked after. Since so much of the American church was not paying any attention to these issues, they didn't like this. They tended to be very conservative; I'm not saying necessarily politically conservative, but certainly socially conservative. They didn't like a skeptic, or a "tamed cynic," to use his phrase, who was skeptical about their efforts to protect their own safety and not take risks on behalf of their congregants. So he wasn't popular and he did not have leadership positions. He had minor positions in the Federal Council of Churches in the 1930s, but as of the '40s and '50s, when he became famous, he did not have leadership positions. He was influential, I think, but he had no power. He taught, and lots of students cared about him tremendously and took away from his classes a lot. And he preached in college chapels. I think I've calculated there were only three churches in all of the United States that actually asked him to preach in their pulpits.

Q: There's an exchange about belief and unbelief that your father had on the way out of church one Sunday with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. What does it say about what they both thought about belief?

A: Justice Frankfurter was our summer neighbor in the little town in Massachusetts where my father wrote the Serenity Prayer. He came up one Sunday morning to hear my father preach. Frankfurter was an agnostic Jew, a nonobservant Jew, proudly so. He didn't mince about it. He said after the service to my father, "May a believing unbeliever thank you for your sermon?" And my father said, "Thank you so much. May an unbelieving believer thank you for your words?" What does it mean? I think it means (and this is a point I've tried to stress about all of these people -- Frankfurter, my father, all of their confederates in their shared battles) they had a tremendous respect for the effort to lead spiritually useful or meaningful lives, even on the part of people who did not necessarily believe in a coherent doctrine or dogma of a church or a temple. I think Frankfurter was saying that he understood the religious dimension and the spiritual meaning that Christians and Jews might attach to Scripture, let us say, but he could not himself join. He wasn't a believer in the sense that he didn't sign on for the whole doctrine, the whole dogma. But he could "relate," as we would say now, to it. That was what a "believing unbeliever" was. And my father was saying that even people who claim to be Christians, who say that they are believers, will always have moments of doubt or uncertainty about what this means. What do they believe in? What are they thinking about? What is it that they believe? And how does that relate to their inmost spiritual commitments and concerns? There will always be wavering moments. He counted himself as somebody who would be an "unbelieving believer" from time to time. He liked to quote the Bible on this. When the father of the little boy brought to Jesus to be cured is told by Jesus that the boy will be cured if he believes, the father of the boy says, "Oh, Lord, I believe. Help Thou my unbelief."

Q: You mentioned uncertainty, and you write explicitly about both the tolerance there was for uncertainty in the community of Heath and its broad-spiritedness. I wonder if that's one of the important differences between the present moment and the time at which your father wrote the Serenity Prayer. Is tolerance for uncertainty one of the things that distinguishes him and those who surrounded him from contemporary American religion?

A: I would say it's the principal thing, yes. There were fundamentalists and evangelical fundamentalists around since forever. My grandfather, my father's father, who was a pastor, did battle with them a hundred years ago. Some of my father's closest associates in the '20s and '30s did repeated battles with the fundamentalists over issues of church governance and every kind of issue that involves religion in the public sphere. They were then not as ascendant as they are now. It has always been my feeling that, for me, the people that I know who are truly devout -- I don't mean just Christians either; also Jews and Muslims and Buddhists -- have some understanding of the difficulty and the complications of the spiritual life that require you to be tolerant about the moments when your faith may wobble a bit. The distinguishing characteristic of the fundamentalists for over a hundred years is that they do not permit this of themselves or of anybody else, and that they know they are right and don't want to have any argument about it. Where it comes from, psychologically or politically, I can't begin to understand. It's fierce, it's unfriendly, it's doctrinaire and, to me, unsympathetic. If you really push me, I might say I really find it un-Christian, because it seems so uncharitable.

Q: Did Reinhold Niebuhr have evangelical friends? What kind of relationships did he have with evangelicals?

A: The word "evangelical" is already very complicated, because he himself came from a denomination called the Evangelical and Reformed Church. He considered himself an evangelical in many ways. He certainly came out of a church tradition that believed in the importance of the Scripture as the guiding principle behind worship and commitments of faith. To that degree, he was himself an evangelical. The Lutheran Church in Germany is called the Evangelical Church of Germany. So the word "evangelical" is a little slippery here. In modern-day journalistic parlance, people now talk about evangelicals as those who are all those things that I've just described, plus adding a kind of ecstatic and emotional fervor to the services, and a rather simple theology. Did he have evangelical friends? Of course, he knew them. He knew every kind of, stripe of person in the church. And he had many, many different friends and colleagues and associates in the church. Did he have close friends who were evangelicals of the kind that would fit the modern journalistic description of evangelical? I don't think so, because I think he felt that their understanding of the Bible was too simple. Their understanding of the New Testament was too simple and rather black-and-white or optimistically, straightforwardly simple. He found the Christian message a more complex and tragic one. They didn't like that, so they didn't want to talk to him, so they didn't talk much.

Q: Could you say more about that tragic Christian message and his sense of tragedy? Do you think it colors the Serenity Prayer?

A: Oh, sure I do. My father and many other theologians -- this is not original with him; this goes back to St. Augustine -- understand that the Christian message sees life as tragic. We die in the end. Suffering happens. The interesting Christian issue is embedding (to use this awful new word) this very idea of suffering and death into the very heart of the story of God's love and mercy for us; that is, in the crucifixion of Jesus. So many theologians' understanding of Christian thought would have it that you get strength from understanding that this is at the heart of it; that there is hope and confidence beyond the suffering. This is what the story tells us. I'm being extremely simplistic here. These are extremely complex and difficult issues to talk about quickly. Certainly in his political writing as well as in his theological writing, he emphasized that human history is full of pain, sorrow, defeat, and evil -- lots and lots of sin and evil. You can't have a faith that bubbles up with enthusiastic reassurance that everything is going to come out all right in the end, because there is too much evidence that this is simply not the case. And, as he wrote once, if you build your faith on the notion that everything is going to be okay in the end -- which many evangelical preachers do -- you will inevitably disappoint people, because it isn't like that -- never was and never will be. The joyous affirmation of hope in the future, which is also part of the Christian message, can be said, can be reaffirmed, but not without remembering the difficulties.

Q: The label "neo-orthodox" is often applied to him.

A: Yes. It is, I think, becoming obsolete now, because what was orthodox -- [of] which his was a neo-orthodox permutation or mutation -- is now no longer what is orthodox. I noticed this particularly in discussions I've had at Union Seminary about his legacy in recent years. The students now didn't seem particularly interested in knowing or parsing what was the orthodox, or unorthodox, position in the 1920s, when that label was first put on, or maybe it was the early 1930s. But then, most Protestant preachers and thinkers in the United States tended to be either very optimistic in the Panglossian way, which he found incompatible with the real message of Christian Scripture, or they were very harsh and doctrinaire in ways that he also found unsympathetic. But his labeling as "neo-orthodox" involves -- I really can't explain it, to tell you the truth, because I think it's a sort of technical theological term of trade that is not very current, frankly. Students are discovering that he is still relevant to them, even though he didn't talk about women. He certainly talked about race, so the rap against him on the race issue is that he didn't talk enough about it. He didn't talk about women; that's perfectly true. He certainly talked about class all the time, so he's very current there. But students are interested in redefining his importance in those ways.

Q: Many students first encountered him reading MORAL MAN AND IMMORAL SOCIETY in college.

A: I don't think that book has become irrelevant at all. I had the pleasure and privilege of meeting President Clinton last spring, and he said he could remember it as if it [were] yesterday when he read this as a sophomore in college. He still found it relevant. A friend of mine who teaches international relations, who assigns it, says he still finds that his students find it relevant. Now, my father dissociated himself from it somewhat toward the end of his life. He thought it was simplistic -- that life was even more complicated than he had claimed in his paradoxes in that book. In my own experience as an editor, I've discovered that writers always like to remove themselves a little from their very earliest books and claim that they've gotten better as they grew older.

Q: There is in your book a great appreciation for the tradition of American Protestantism, but also a critique of it. Why do you think that mainline American Protestantism seems to have lost its voice?

A: I wish I knew. I think the country is becoming more and more secular. The men and women of the churches that have been losing membership over the past decades have been rattled by this, have been rattled by their loss, and they haven't maintained their confidence and buoyancy and assurance that they really are onto something that makes sense and that is an ongoing enterprise that they should care about. They somehow give off vibes of uncertainty about their own relevance. This is a mistake the fundamentalists have never made. Messy and noisy and frivolous and crass as the culture becomes, the more the churches seem to be "not with it." They don't seem to know how to get a grip on this. I say that because, as a person reading the newspapers and watching television and trying to keep up with current events, that's what it seems like to me. But for all I know, and I'm sure this is the case, there are literally thousands of parishes of all denominations -- Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Episcopalian -- around the country that are doing wonderful work, with vivid and important contributions to their communities. I don't for a minute want to suggest otherwise. But they don't seem to have, as it were, specific gravity that weighs in on important matters at the national level, for example.

Q: One of the measures of that is the often-repeated observation that there is no one around like Reinhold Niebuhr, and there hasn't been since he died.

A: As I said earlier, though, he was never a leader of the church. The churches had leaders that spoke out. They had bishops and heads of the churches who took positions on important matters and made themselves heard. Why that isn't the case, I'm not so sure. I hope this is only a temporary thing. But there does seem to be a kind of loss of rhetorical vitality, even if not a genuine spiritual vitality, which may still be there. I would imagine there are a number of reasons for it, not just one. I am sorry to see it, because I think the country needs it. Every community needs it, and we need it. Toward the very end of my father's life, he wrote to his friend, Bishop Will Scarlett, a leader of the Episcopal Church, saying, as he read about what church people were up to and what they were doing in their meetings and programs and statements, "I feel they're all fleeing into the cellars of irrelevance." That's what I think happened. I think that actually the issue is civil courage, speaking out on things that matter to you and about which you have true faith and belief. It's not an easy thing to develop. [My father's] whole generation had it, for sure, and marvelously so. They were tempered, may I say, by two world wars. Although that shouldn't be a requirement, to suffer through terrible holocausts, to be able to be fearless, these people were fearless. I think fear governs a great many people, including leaders of the church.

Q: Did Reinhold Niebuhr fear anything? Was he disillusioned in any sense, especially at the end of his life? And what prayers were most meaningful to him at that stage?

A: The question of his own fears, I think, is a legitimate one, which he would have addressed or wanted to address. He became very ill after a series of strokes in 1952, prior to which he had been working at absolutely top speed, in overdrive, without much gas in the tank. Then he had to stop completely. Toward the end of his life, he therefore had to consider not only what was the meaning of his work, because now it was so curtailed, he had to reconfigure it, but also what was the meaning of what he had been doing before, and was he rushing about, doing one thing after another, because he was fleeing from something which he might have paid more attention to, had he slowed down? Or was he anxious about something in a way that was inappropriate? I think he feared having wasted his life doing work that amounted to very little, that was all sort of noise, blue smoke, and mirrors, but hadn't really contributed anything that would last. He feared his debility, and he feared death. We all do. As he slowed down and had to face his own physical weakness, he had to face these fears, just as each one of us must. Then he said himself that he couldn't do the prayer properly, that he lacked the courage to accept with serenity what had happened to him, and that he didn't have the courage to make the changes in his life that he should. What he said -- he spoke this in the 1960s, some ten years later -- was that, for a long time, he had suffered from melancholia and depression after his strokes and could not obey the injunction of the prayer. He recovered from that. He acknowledged that there were these moments of depression from which he was recuperated. We all can.

Q: Did the Serenity Prayer ever take on the immensity for him that it took on for the rest of the world? Or was there something even more meaningful to him?

A: Were there more meaningful prayers than this? I imagine there were. I don't know what they are. This was one of the many, many prayers that he wrote. I don't, frankly, know how often he repeated some of the other ones. There were some other wonderful, much longer prayers that he wrote, that he may have used over and over again. Since I didn't attend, by a long shot, all of the services that he conducted, I don't know. I would think that certain prayers for specific things -- this is a very general prayer, after all -- might have meant a great deal to him in specific circumstances. So, no, this prayer did not have a particular significance for him. I think he was grateful that many people found it helpful, and he was gratified by its use, but it didn't mean much more than that to him in a special, personal way.

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