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I don't agree with the Freepers who are assuming some sort of organized plot by FOX News to nominate Romney. Contrary to the Washington Post's notorious attack a few years ago on religious people for being easily led, that's not true at all. A serious and united effort by evangelical and Roman Catholic conservatives unleashes a force much like the Tea Party — it cannot be controlled by mainstream Republican leaders, they know it, and they fear what they cannot control.

This post by Murdoch, who just joined Twitter, is even more interesting: “I'm getting killed for fooling around here and friends frightened what I may really say!”

We may all be very surprised when we see the real Murdoch via Twitter, unfiltered by his staff. Murdoch has been called the last of the media magnates, and there's a lot of truth to that... he owns the company, he can do what he wants, and now he has the ability to say what he wants to 78,446 followers he's gathered in just three days, and presumably a couple of hundred thousand soon, and then a few million.

Bluntly, this tweet supporting Santorum is not at **ALL** what I expected from Rupert Murdoch.

I tremendously respect Murdoch's work creating FOX News, but I never thought he had much use for Christian conservatives. It looks like I was wrong.

The Australian and British media environments are so secularized that apart from a few places in Wales, the Scottish Highlands and the Islands, there really isn't much left of Christian culture in Britain comparable to the American South or significant parts of the rural American Midwest. Of course there are some large churches in London and other major cities, but there are also large churches in New York City and Los Angeles, and their members know they cannot hope to influence culture so they focus on personal faith. That's obviously not a bad thing but it doesn't create a Christian culture.

(BTW, I'm writing here as a former member of Neighborhood Church of Greenwich Village in New York City, which for many years was the only evangelical church in the Village that managed to stay alive in an incredibly hostile environment.)

I can't quite figure out where Murdoch has learned about American politically active religious believers — it certainly doesn't come from his background. Perhaps Murdoch has learned from Israeli politics that religion sometimes means a great deal to voters, and the Republican Party looks much more like the politics of Israel than those of Britain or Australia.

Maybe he's just spent enough time in America reading newspapers to know that we don't think like many conservative Brits or Aussies — God and faith are not mere words to lots of conservative Americans.