I don't know about you but I don't see many signs of unselfish faith anywhere these days, at all. I think where I get hung up on what exactly faith is, is somewhere around when someone says it's some "something" that can be summoned, and when I look it up on wikipedia it's something produced on demand by enlightened individuals who catch on at some point.
There's one problem that's been fairly rampant in America for over a century: no one is enlightened anymore, and no one can give any convincing reason that their vision of faith, or just simply what got them through the hard times, is useful to you. Is today's world anything like what the people who built it intended when they set out a few decades ago? Are their sources of faith still useful, and if they're not, well then who's selling the faith fodder these days?
i.e. if faith is what everyone needs, then you have to look first at why it's fallen out of favor to the point where it needs a sales pitch. Why people give a shit about more things than ever before, and why none of them involve the fundamental component to doing the hard stuff: a good reason why.