Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, an ordained minister, religion professor and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, says supporters of the tea party movement are afraid of the white race becoming a minority in the United States. Thistlewaite spoke at the Brookings Institution on Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2010 in Washington. (CNSNews.com/Penny Starr)

Washington (CNSNews.com) – A new survey on the tea party movement says tea party supporters are “more comfortable with white privilege,” according to a panel member who helped analyze the data.

The survey, which analyzes the movement and its ties to the “religious right,” was conducted between Sept. 1 and Sept. 15, 2010 from among 3,013 randomly selected people contacted by telephone. The survey shows that 80 percent of respondents who said they considered themselves supporters of the tea party are non-Hispanic or white.

Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, an ordained minister, theology professor and senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, said the data indicates anxiety about the changing racial landscape in America, where white people are projected to be a minority by 2050. She said that is part of the appeal of TV and radio personality Glenn Beck, who is trying to “redefine whiteness” by making this group victims of discrimination.

“I can generalize and say those attracted to the tea party are more comfortable with white privilege as a value and believe that leveling the playing field for minorities is not the business of government,” Thistlethwaite said Tuesday at the Brookings Institution.

Thistlethwaite, who said she talked to a number of people at a tea party event in Chicago, said this value is in conflict with those of charitable Evangelical Christians who work in the U.S. and abroad to help people in need.

Anxieties about the economy, threats to male breadwinners and the “changing demographics of the American racial landscape” are among the elements that define the tea party movement, Thistlethwaite said.

“Everybody knows 2050 is projected to be the year when racial ethnic minority Americans become the majority of the population,” Thistlethwaite said. “MSNBC reported in March that 2010 may be the tipping point year where more racial ethnic minority babies are born than those identified as white.

“So there is a racial shift in this landscape, and I think the fact that we have an 80 percent reporting of ‘white’ as the racial category of the tea party, you cannot discount the role of race in interpreting this data,” Thistlethwhite said.

“And I think one thing that I observed, certainly, and in talking to people was…a lot of expressed anxiety and repressed fear: People said, ‘I am afraid. I’m afraid of this. I’m afraid of that. I’m afraid of other things.’ She said these anxieties are part of the appeal of people like Glenn Beck.

“So when you read that vocabulary and you let this data talk to you, one of the things it was saying to me, certainly in some public figures, like Glenn Beck, this appears to be obviously true – this is an attempt to redefine whiteness as victimization and to see whiteness as the object of racial discrimination,” Thistlethwaite said. 

Other panelists were Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute and Michael Gerson, a Washington Post opinion writer and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, who has attributed the tea party movement’s appeal to a “broad nostalgia” felt by religious conservatives who long for what they see as a more ideal America that existed in the past.

E.J. Dionne, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and liberal political commentator, said the tea party is just the 'old right' with cable television, social networking, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and wealthy donors. (CNSNews.com/Penny Starr)

Panel moderator E. J. Dionne, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said he had a “one sentence answer” for a writer from New Yorker magazine who asked if the tea party was really a new phenomenon or just the same kind of conservatism defined by southern politicians such as Jesse Helms and others who, she said, opposed the civil rights movement.

“If you look at their language, their references to the Constitution, their attitudes toward the peril the country faces, as I see it, I think in so many ways, I think the Tea Party is the old right with a cable network, a group of talk shows, social networking, some rather wealthy donors, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck,” Dionne said.

The “American Values Survey: Religion, Values and the Mid-Term Elections” listed among its “top findings” that tea party supporters are more likely than the general population to be “non-Hispanic white, are more supportive of small government, are overwhelmingly supportive of Sarah Palin, and report that Fox News is their most trusted source of news about politics and current events.”

The survey also indicated that 48 percent of tea party supporters “identify with” the Republican Party and 26 percent “lean toward” the GOP.

The Ford Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation funded the survey.