Survivorship bias and the Christian faith

By Daniel Francis

My curiosity these days has led me to follow pages that teach me something in small bite-sized packages. This past week I learned about something called ‘Survivorship Bias’.

The basic premise is that there is a tendency to focus on the success stories or, in this context, the ones who had their prayers answered while ignoring the many others who had the opposite experience, those who weren’t successful nor had their prayer answered or their miracle granted.

This tendency to focus on the success stories and not the whole picture creates a skewed or incomplete understanding, hence a Survivorship Bias.

Survivorship Bias is easy to perpetuate in our current lives because many of our systems are set up to show the ‘best’. You scroll on social media for more than a few moments, and you will see many curated versions of this.

Even listening to a homily during Sunday morning Mass, you may hear about the miracles people have experienced through God, prayers answered through faith and miss the countless others who did not have the same snap experience.

While it is very encouraging to see and hear stories of success, it can create an unrealistic spiritual expectation. You can foster an expectation that faith leads to immediate reward, but you will be disappointed when things don’t work out that way.

Realistically, many people’s prayers go immediately unanswered. They pray for protection and still face loss. They give tithes and there is still delay, or they fast and they still can’t hear God’s will for them. However, their stories are also equally as valuable because God has a plan for them that they should trust.

I remember meeting with a close business associate. Our conversations would always surround our business ventures and our current spiritual status. We both do our best in business and we both try our best with our relationships with God. He is much further along than I am with his businesses. Earlier, in his experience, he had many hardships just as I did. He prayed for success, again just as I did,  but unlike me, he hit his targets. He hit a stride early on with a big client and that propelled his success. His prayers were answered and his hard work paid off. I, on the other hand, was still stuck in the trenches, putting in the hard work but not seeing even half his success.

My mindset in business was always to keep pushing no matter what and I knew that God would provide when the time was right for me.

Last year, I took a leap of faith and invested heavily in an author conference I hosted. It was an enormous financial and time investment.

At the time, I didn’t even have all the funds required to put the event on initially, but I trusted the direction I believed God was pointing me in. I realised that enduring years of operating ‘lean’ put me in a unique position to be able to produce great results even with the little I had.

Long story short, the conference was a success. Even though we made a bit of a loss from the event, the success the event continued to bring after it ended helped to pay off the debt.

Survivorship Bias can lead us to mistake success for favour. However, sometimes favour looks like the grace to endure a tough season, not just the grace to escape it. Real faith is not always about the outcome but the experience of persevering through difficult periods and the transformation during hardship.

There are countless stories in the Bible of faithful people who suffered, waited, and didn’t see a resolution but stayed strong like Job, Paul, and Jeremiah.

So, let’s practice mature faith where we see beyond results and put our full trust in God’s plan whether we experience immediate or delayed success. Don’t allow Survivorship Bias to distort your faith.

Miracles or hardships, faith lives in all the different experiences. So, stand firm in your faith to know that God has a plan for you.

Daniel Francis is a millennial helping othermillennials. He is a two-time author of the books The Millennial Mind and The Millennial Experience, and an entrepreneur. Over the past four years, he has served as a Personal Development Coach whose work targets Millennials and helps them tap into their full potential. He is also a self-publishing coach and has guided hundreds on self-publishing their book successfully.

LinkedIn: Daniel Francis

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Email: themillennialmind2020@gmail.com