The Wounds We Missed: Survivorship Bias in Christian Witness
How listening to those who stayed blinded us to those who didn’t
During World War II, analysts studied fighter planes that returned from missions, paying close attention where they were most frequently shot. They advised engineers to reinforce the areas of the planes that had the most bullet holes. The logic was simple: give the most reinforcement where the planes were most hit. Despite their best efforts, this strategy did little to increase the rate at which pilots were able to return home.
Enter statistician Abraham Wald. He suggested that there was a crucial flaw in the process, which he called survivorship bias. Analysts were only examining planes that made it home, rather than asking what made it possible for them to do so. In other words the real danger was wherever the bullet holes weren’t. Planes that were shot in those areas never made it back to be analyzed.
Survivorship bias happens when we focus on a few successful examples and ignore the many failures. The problem is this creates an inaccurate perception of reality. For instance, when aspiring entrepreneurs study successful businesspeople like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, they often overlook the countless startups that failed despite similar ideas and efforts. Similarly, musicians might aspire to the fame of their favorite artist, ignoring the thousands of equally talented musicians who never get their big break. By fixating only on those who "made it," we neglect important lessons about failure, persistence, and the unpredictable factors influencing success. We end up with a warped understanding of what success even means.
I contend that the church has recently operated with a survivorship bias. Of course this is a generalization, but I believe it is an accurate one. And though churches and Christian institutions maybe more or less guilty of it, I would argue that survivorship bias is a temptation we should work to avoid.
Over the last two decades, especially in response to the deconstruction movement, Christians have gotten very good at listening to ourselves. We've built entire ministries around the questions of people who stayed. We’ve wielded apologetics with all the force of a courtroom drama, answering objections, reinforcing beliefs, and restating the case for Christ with fresh rhetorical flair. And yet, the focus has primarily been on those who have survived.
We haven't asked, what about the people who didn’t?
Survivorship bias happens when we draw conclusions from a subset of people or data that survived a particular process, forgetting the larger population who didn’t.
Survivorship bias exposes a kind of blindness. We see only what’s left, and we build our theories, strategies, even our faith responses, around that. In the spiritual life, this bias has snuck in through an unnoticed side door. We listen to testimonies of victory and stories of resolve. We publish books by those who doubted and returned stronger. We quote the intellectuals who almost left the faith but didn’t. We assume their stories are representative of reality.
But these stories are not the whole story.
We need to reckon with the fact that many others left and never came back.
What Happened to the Deconstruction Movement?
In the early 2000s, there was this hope that we were on the verge of something new. Writers like Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, and Donald Miller gave voice to a generation disenchanted with formulaic faith and culture-war Christianity. They raised honest questions. They used metaphor and memoir. They spoke with a kind of spiritual discontent that felt more like homesickness than heresy, eventually embracing the latter.
But over time, something changed.
The deconstruction movement, originally a kind of reformation-from-within, began to unravel into a popularity of deconversion. Many who once used the word "deconstructing" in hopes of a deeper, truer Christianity now use it as a kind of exit ramp from the faith altogether. Podcasts replaced pulpits. Threads replaced testimonies. And in many cases, the very wounds people hoped to heal by questioning their churches were dismissed, defended, or outright denied.
And as the movement grew, so did the defensive posture of the church.
We circled the wagons. We developed new curriculums. We trained up apologists. We focused on proving Christianity’s truthfulness to people who already agreed it was probably true. All while the wounded wandered.
The Connection to Discipleship
Survivorship bias isn't just a statistical error. It's a discipleship crisis.
When our ministries are shaped only by “success stories,” we end up with a distorted picture of what it means to follow Jesus. We think the biggest questions are about the age of the earth or the existence of objective morality. But if you talk to those who have left, or those who are barely hanging on, you find a different set of questions:
Why is so much abuse covered up?
Why do churches tend shame people instead of helping them?
Why does this religion seem more interested in being right than in being good?
These are not abstract questions. They are existential cries. And too often, they go unanswered. This is not because there are no answers, but because we didn’t think they were the real questions.
We’ve been busy defending our doctrinal aircraft in the places it was already reinforced. We’ve been explaining why the Bible is reliable, without asking whether we’ve been reliable interpreters of it. We’ve been defending God’s justice without examining our own. In doing so, we’ve left the most important issues unguarded and our largest problems unaddressed.
Answering the Questions No One is Asking
Apologetics, at its best, is an expression of love. It’s a way of helping people see the hope that is found at the heart of Christianity—hope in Jesus Christ. But over time, it has become something else, something defensive, anxious, and overly technical. It often sounds like a doctor giving a lecture on human anatomy to someone dying of grief.
We have found ourselves answering questions no one is actually asking. We talk at length about whether we can trust the manuscript tradition of the New Testament. All the while, people are asking whether they can trust anyone at all.
We’ve mistaken curiosity for crisis. We’ve missed that many people aren’t struggling to believe in God’s existence but in God’s goodness, having seen so little of ours.
This is not a call to abandon reasoned argument or theological clarity. I still believe Christianity is objectively true, and I will continue, God helping me, to argue for that truth as long as I live. But if we do apologetics as if people are mostly minds with questions, rather than souls with wounds, we will keep building our case while the crowd quietly slips out the back.
The Wound that Heals
There is a difference between critical wounds and fatal ones.
Some people leave the church because they were cut deeply but still carry a longing to return. Others left because they were spiritually suffocated and no longer believe there's air on the inside. Both are wounds. But one is survivable. The other may not be unless we begin tending to it.
This is where spiritual formation matters most. If our churches continue to produce Christians who are theologically precise but spiritually hollow, we will continue losing people—not to better arguments, but to better love.
We must disciple people not just into belief, but into Christlikeness.
That means practicing what Dallas Willard called "the renovation of the heart," training people to be the kind of persons who naturally live as Jesus would live, if he were them. It means slowing down our programs, reimagining our small groups, and retraining our leaders to ask different questions:
What are you grieving?
What do you fear?
Where is Jesus meeting you right now?
The ones who left may not return to better logic. But they might return to better love.
The Planes That Didn’t Come Back
The church is not just a place for those who are convinced. It is a hospital for the hurting, a home for the homesick, and, most painfully, a graveyard for those we didn’t reach in time.
When we ignore the planes that didn’t return, we build a theology that only makes sense to survivors. But Jesus was not just a healer of those who made it back. He went after the one. He wept for the city. He called Lazarus out of the grave.
And maybe the church should too.
I am in no way suggesting that we neglect those who have stayed. That would be a pendulum swing to the opposite extreme. The people still sitting in our pews, still showing up to small group, still wrestling with faith inside the walls of the church—they matter deeply, and their questions deserve careful, compassionate attention.
The point here is not about choosing one over the other. It’s about remembering those we’ve unintentionally forgotten. It’s about holding in our hearts both the faithful and the fractured, both the returned and the missing. Because love, if it is truly Christlike, makes room for both.
Let us not be so busy explaining the faith to those who never left that we forget the ones who did. Let us not be so focused on the critical wounds inside the church that we miss the fatal ones just outside it. Because grace doesn’t just speak to those who stayed. It sings over the prodigal as he limps home. It waits at the edge of the driveway. It throws a party not for the strong, but for the returning.
Perhaps, sometimes, apologetics sounds less like an answer and more like a welcome.