Clever prayer, but wrongly attributed. It was originally written (prayed) by Rev. Joe Wright from Wichita, Kansas. It has been widely attributed to Paul Harvey and Billy Graham, but neither had anything to do with it. Check Snopes.com.
Doug Beyer

The reason it is attributed to Paul Harvey is a good one— he read it out on one of his radio broadcasts ans something he endorsed. Snopes isn’t infallible
BW3

Technically Snopes is not incorrect… they say the prayer was “neither written nor _first_ presented” (emphasis added) by Harvey.
Ben, at some point I’d love to hear your beef with Snopes. I know you’ve gone out of your way in the past to talk about their fallibility, but I’ve never actually seen you present something that is factually incorrect on their site.

This prayer only became well known because it was on Paul Harvey’s enormously widely syndicated radio show. It did indeed become known as Paul Harvey’s prayer. I used to listen to the show. So for Snopes to suggest this was inappropriate is absurd. Most Americans would know this prayer only because Harvey quoted it and agreed with it. I have no problems with being precisely correct, but Snopes relies entirely too much on purely online resources. And they are often inaccurate. My word to them is— go to the source! I tell my students the same thing. Much of what you can research online is not reliable information, and we here at Asbury do not allow students to use online resources from sites we know do not always provide us with reliable information.
BW3

Going to the source, in this case, would mean going to Rev. Joe Wright. Right?

The first two everybody can agree with–they’re rather empty.
I’d not say politics is the abuse of power, to the extent it’s democratic. But in the Senate today, where the minority rules, it plainly isn’t.
The Founders were themselves very much creatures of the Enlightenment. Wright’s last point is deeply confused.
On my own reckoning, of the eight controversial points, Wright gets one quite right (the lottery), covetousness/ambition more right than wrong, and self-esteem/discipline maybe a third right. But I suspect a large (maybe even the abortion point as phrased) majority of Americans agrees with them all. No wonder Paul Harvey had so many faithful listeners.

Actually Doug the answer to this is yes and no. Rev. Wright of course has first dibs on what he meant by the prayer, but Paul Harvey used it for his own purposes and as a good expression of his own views on these matters. So if we wanted to know what the public discussion was about this prayer, and why it affected so many, we would need to go to Harvey and his voluminous mail and responses to this prayer. But alas, he is long gone.
BW3

“Paul Harvey used it for his own purposes and as a good expression of his own views on these matters.“
When I use one of Witherington’s poems for my own purposes and as an expression of my own views on my widely listened to radio program, nice to know he’ll regard it as Leftie’s.
And it’s nice to know too that the concern about who first wrote the serenity prayer is misplaced. Since AA has made most use of it, it’s more theirs than Niebuhr’s?

Hey Ben,
The misattribution continues. Bob Russell of Southeast Christian church actually wrote the prayer and shared it at the Govenors Prayer Breakfast. Joe Wright borrowed it for his prayer before the Kansas Legislature.
Joe later gave credit to Bob for writing the prayer.

Looks like the point has been missed.
BW3 writes to his audience to enlighten us; it’s either comforting or convicting.
This is much like the writers in the Bible. Dr. Luke spoke Jesus’ original oratory to his audience, but the tax collector used the same words to make a different point.
1 author
a few copywrite frauds (eh,hem!)
many audiences (jew/gentile, left/right, male/female)
numerous responses
….priceless!
Go back to the “prayer” and respond.