Robert Enright knows too well the damage that guns can do.

He knows that they are used in even more suicides each year than homicides. And he knows that in the United States in 2020, the combined total of all those deaths exceeded 43,000.

So, at one level, he understands the push for stricter gun laws. He understands that fewer guns in fewer hands, probably means fewer deaths.

He’s looking deeper.

“It’s only half the equation,” said Enright, a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “8 Keys to Forgiveness.”

“What’s missing,” he said, “is we have to change the heart.

“Forgiveness is what I call heart surgery.”

Small sample size, encouraging findings

Enright also says: “It is a controversial issue, this idea of forgiveness. Especially these days.”

Just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Enright finished a forgiveness study of male prisoners at a maximum security prison.

When the inmates were assessed (the study had only 24 prisoners at its peak), 90% said they had experienced “moderate to severe injustices against them as children or adolescents,” Enright said, “and 40% never told anyone.”

With that as a starting point, Enright divided the inmates into two groups of 12. One group would spend six months going through Enright’s book with a therapist and learning about the value of forgiveness. The other group spent that time in what amounted to boiler plate Department of Corrections therapy. Or as Enright said: “Look at your victim. Doesn’t that make you feel badly? Now, don’t do that again.”

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At the end of the six months, Enright says the inmates who went through forgiveness therapy showed significant changes in attitude.

“They even began displaying empathy toward others,” he said. “That didn’t happen with those in the regular Department of Corrections treatment.

“We have a small, but powerful sample,” he said, adding that the second group of 12 went through forgiveness therapy and the results were replicated.

“Bob Enright is the most outstanding scholar of forgiveness that we have, truly the pioneer of the topic,” said Frank Farley, a professor of psychological studies at Temple University and a past president of the American Psychological Association.

“His work has helped untold numbers of people.”

That said, Enright was correct that his work is controversial.

Even with someone like Farley.

“I worry about the forgiven,” Farley said. “Is it possible it loosens the bonds of responsibility in a free society?”

An ancient concept

Enright’s book, and his study, espouse the capacity to break patterns of destructive behavior that too often pass from one generation to another in a kind of wash, rinse and repeat cycle.

“After (the study), one man said, ‘if I’d had forgiveness intervention when I was 12 years old, I would not be in this prison today,’ ” Enright said. “Another guy, who’s now been released, said: ‘I began to think of my life in new ways.’

“He realized brutality (what had been done to him) fosters brutality (what he did to others),” Enright said.

“One man said, ‘if I’d had forgiveness intervention when I was 12 years old, I would not be in this prison today.’ Another guy, who’s now been released, said: ‘I began to think of my life in new ways.’”

Robert Enright
Author of ‘8 Steps to Forgiveness’

That truth is evident in Memphis, which in 2020 had a record 332 homicides and through the first three months of 2021 had seen a dramatic spike in gun violence.

Put another way: The absence of forgiveness at younger ages is easy to see in the criminal justice system as juveniles graduate from small crimes to big crimes until eventually prison doors are being shut for decades at a time after yet another murder.

“To me, that illustrates what we see play out every day in the court,” Shelby County District Attorney General Amy Weirich said. “By the time the trigger is pulled, we have a grieving victim’s family and, let’s be honest, a grieving offender’s family.

“And by then, it’s too late. I’ve got limited options as a prosecutor as to how to handle that situation.”

Initiatives, such as the DA office’s focused deterrence effort and Mayor Jim Strickland’s Group Violence Intervention Program, may help some.

“We need more evidence-based programming in the prison system or as an alternative to prison. The programs work,” Weirich said, adding that more resources are needed to get positive results in larger numbers.

Enright is convinced forgiveness training needs to start early and eventually must become organic.

Whether across the globe, or throughout metropolitan Memphis.

“It starts in a person’s heart.”

Floyd Bonner
Shelby County Sheriff

“It starts in a person’s heart,” Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner said.

Reaching out to teenagers is good, to 11- and-12-year-olds even better, but Enright says, “even people who are 7 years old – we can help children learn what forgiveness is, like when they get pushed down on the playground.”

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Enright has conducted forgiveness training around the world, going to “hot spots” in Africa and the Middle East. He does this from a purely secular perspective, noting: “I’m at one of the most radically secular universities in the world. If I started preaching from Christianity or Judaism, I’d be out on my ear.”

Even so, he is well aware of religious history.

“Forgiveness holds an honored place in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The Dalai Lama (Buddhism), when he came to America, he spoke about forgiveness.

“Confucianism, Hinduism – they also have a place for forgiveness,” Enright said. “I’ve never seen an ancient text critical of forgiveness.

“Only modern texts are critical of forgiveness.”

Beyond the pain

Viktor Frankl was a Holocaust survivor. He also was a psychiatrist, and he wrote the best-seller, “Man’s Search for Meaning.”

Frankl spent time at four concentration camps, including Auschwitz, where his brother died and his mother was killed. His wife died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

While held at the camps, Frankl and a few others tried to prevent suicides by helping their fellow prisoners — many in the depths of depression — to focus on happy memories and thoughts.

Enright says Frankl determined: “When you suffer gravely, you have two kinds of people — those who find meaning in their suffering and those who do not. Only those who could find meaning were able to thrive” after the suffering had ended.

In a 2012 documentary, “Beyond Right and Wrong: Stories of Justice and Forgiveness,” filmmaker Lekha Singh spoke with people in Rwanda, Ireland and the Middle East who had suffered atrocities.

A man in Rwanda had killed a woman’s five children and, in the film, he asks her for forgiveness.

She gives it.

Farley, the psychology professor at Temple, shows the film to his classes and then has students write essays.

“Most kids,” he said, “feel they couldn’t forgive someone who slaughtered their five children.”

Early in the process

Enright says he understands the concept of forgiveness will be easier for some than others, and that in some situations it is a much bigger ask than in others.

“We don’t talk to one another,” Bonner said, adding that this goes a long way toward explaining why conflict resolution is so difficult.

Enright also understands that, despite the prevalence of forgiveness in many world religions, it is a radical concept in today’s world. 

“Modernism has fallen into materialism,” he said. “You can’t grab forgiveness, can’t touch it or see it. It’s an abstract idea. It’s not gonna get anyone rich and lead to a big house with a pool in the backyard.

“Modernism has fallen into materialism. You can’t grab forgiveness, can’t touch it or see it. It’s an abstract idea. It’s not gonna get anyone rich and lead to a big house with a pool in the backyard.”

Robert Enright

“In fact, with forgiveness, you’re going to have to go through the suffering and not deny it or mask it. Once you get through the suffering, then you can find release in that.”

Before the pandemic, Enright was traveling the world, trying to spread the forgiveness gospel. But he also thinks about the big cities and small towns of America, of the prevalent violence in the country and the astronomical homicide numbers – 332 murders in Memphis last year, as a city of 651,000, compared to 680 murders in Canada, a country of 38 million.

Early, forgiveness-focused intervention could change those numbers, he believes.

“Forgiveness education is in its early days,” he said. “I have no idea why forgiveness education has not been front and center in large societies for thousands of years. It’s embarrassingly simple:

“Help children understand when they are treated unfairly, there is a way out of the poison of resentment.”

The men in his prison study never had that advantage. The resentment festered. They continued the pattern of violence they learned long ago, often with the use of a gun.

Keeping guns away from people like that could help; Enright gets it.

He wants more.

“If we take guns away, the heart still isn’t right,” he said. “Taking guns away is an incomplete philosophy. It’s reductionism.

“The real underlying problem is the heart is not healed from injustice against that person.

“If we healed all the hearts in the world,” he said, “we probably wouldn’t need to take all the guns away.”