There is only so much "dumbing down" you can do to scientific research about topics until you lose all contextual nuance or become too long winded for a layperson to understand without being overloaded with information.

Then there is the issue with secondary and tertiary sources using simple language that causes confusion because it lacks the contextual nuance necessary to convey the correct interpretation.

Agreed. There's definitely a gap in how conclusions are communicated to the public.

It's crazy to me that so much of the general public don't understand that science is just a protocol of observing, recording, testing, and analyzing results.

True but the public is also being willfully ignorant

But then they still need to trust the journalist. And considering how much crap science gets published even in supposedly high quality journals, and how little quality peer review happens, even the journalists don't have a scientific basis for much of science reporting.

So you have to be religious to be faithful to your spouse?

No, faith doesn't refer to religion. You can have faith that your investment works, you can have faith in democracy or the judicial system, and in many other things.

In fact, if you check out what Wikipedia has to say about it, there's a whole section on "Secular Faith", which includes faith in e.g. philosophical ideas, ethics, personal values and principles and so on.

Faith is just a strong conviction or trust, that's how it's defined. And sure, you can have faith in God. But you can also have faith that the scientific method works and that the amount of published garbage studies is low enough to not break the system.

And this faith can be shaken when learning about meta studies estimating that about 30% of scientific papers are bogus, plagiarized and/or not reproducible.

Or when learning about John Bohannon, and his purposely bogus study on that chocolate helps with weight loss, which he published to show how easy it is to publish nonsense papers, and not only did this study make it onto headlines of newspapers worldwide, but his retraction of the study totally failed to get any publicity at all. He basically couldn't retract his own study from public knowledge.

And like with religious faith, learning about these issues can either lead to either increased understanding, a shaken faith in science in general or an angry counter-attack.

If you don't understand everything in every field of science (and it's impossible to do so), then you have to trust what you cannot prove. And that's literally the same thing as faith. Because it is faith. You blindly trust something without having proof, just trusting that when someone else claims to have proof, that they actually do have proof.