When Paul Tillich wrote Dynamics of Faith in 1957, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, the historian of religions, had yet to publish his two books on belief, which did not appear until the late 1970s.

Still, it was Tillich, in Dynamics of Faith, who identified the problem which Cantwell Smith was to trace to its historical sources and which the visual media since the 1950s, I will argue, have exacerbated to an extreme state. In my brief article I will be exploring the deep roots of this problem with Cantwell Smith's help and its strange fruits by consulting several interpreters of the media, for my contention is that it is a besetting dilemma for the future of public religion in America.

Tillich's name for it is still apt: he called it ‘the distortion of faith’—and I am stressing in particular what he termed the ‘intellectualistic’ distortion of faith. He described it tersely: this distortion involves misconstruing faith as ‘an act of knowledge with a low degree of evidence’. Such a misconstrual, said Tillich, confuses faith with ‘belief’, which differs importantly from it, although he did not closely examine this crucial difference or its historical construction in his little book. Wilfred Cantwell Smith did, however, to our great benefit.

It is the clear finding of his research that belief has only come to be widely—publicly—meant as a cognitive claim about empirical reality under the impetus of modernity, notwithstanding possible prefigurations in Greek thought.