One of the main institutions of the “religious right,” Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, will host Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders at its convocation on September 14th. While the university’s Statement of Mission and Purpose includes the promise to “Promote an understanding of the Western tradition and the diverse elements of American cultural history, especially the importance of the individual in maintaining democratic and free market processes,” Sanders is a self-professed democratic socialist, indeed the only one in national politics.

The senior senator from Vermont said in a statement that “It goes without saying that my views on many issues – women’s rights, gay rights, education – are very different from the opinions of some in the Liberty University community.” Sanders strongly favors legal abortion and same-sex marriage. Religion News Service calls him “unabashedly irreligious,” noting that “He scored a solid zero from Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition in its most recent scorecard and a 100 from the abortion rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America.”

But Sanders says: “I think it is important, however, to see if we can reach consensus regarding the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality in our country, about the collapse of the middle class, about the high level of childhood poverty, about climate change and other issues. It is very easy for a candidate to speak to people who hold the same views. It’s harder but important to reach out to others who look at the world differently. I look forward to meeting with the students and faculty of Liberty University.”

Liberty University’s website has no story on the invitation. According to the Lynchburg newspaper, the News & Advance, the university’s president, Jerry Falwell, said that the school will invite every presidential candidate and that Scott Walker had been part of the series but had to reschedule his address. “School attorneys, he said, believe inviting all candidates during this 2016 election cycle is the safest course of action to protect Liberty University’s nonprofit status under U.S. tax law.”

Others speaking at its convocations during the fall, all except for Sanders conservatives, include Republican candidate Ben Carson, Book of Virtues author William Bennett, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, popular writer Kay Arthur, and Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint. Among the Republican candidates, Jeb Bush has recently spoken there and Ted Cruz announced his candidacy there. The school famously hosted Senator Ted Kennedy in 1983. According to the school’s former vice president Johnnie Moore, the school regularly invited President Obama, Vice-president Biden, and other Democrats, but “They didn’t so much as reply to our invitation.”

The list of speakers notably does not include Sanders’ chief competitor, Hillary Clinton. The senator may have appealed to the university because like the school he also believes something — especially compared with the notoriously calculating Hillary Clinton.

“Clinton is still the favorite of Democratic voters nationally by nearly 30 points,” writes Molly Ball in The Atlantic, referring to Sanders as “the nutty Vermont uncle of Democratic politics.” Clinton, Ball argues, “has the money, she has the endorsements from the party elite, and she has the massive teams of staff and advisers. But Bernie Sanders has one thing Hillary Clinton doesn’t: an ideology.”

Like the university, Sanders speaks to and for a group that feels marginalized. As a conservative Christian institution, the university occupies the cultural edge, standing for the life of the unborn and traditional marriage against the practices mandated by the Supreme Court. “It is easy enough to see where Berniemania is coming from,” Ball writes.

Antiestablishment passion, left and right, is in the air. People are angry all over, fed up with a system that isn’t working, an elite that doesn’t listen, a politics perpetually conducted within a narrow, unrepresentative band of acceptable opinion. “I think there is a lot more anger and frustration on the part of the American people toward corporate America, toward the political establishment, toward the media establishment, than I think inside-the-beltway pundits perceive,” Sanders tells me.

The two may have more in common than they realize, in believing that principles matter in politics, even when you’re in the minority. In any case, the socialist senator will be standing before the faculty and students of Liberty University on September 14th, and good for both of them.