"Republican Sharron Angle says her campaign to unseat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in Nevada is 'a calling' from God and that her faith is helping her endure a fiercely competitive race in which Democrats have depicted her as a conservative extremist," reports AP.

The extremists here, of course, are those who reject the mainstream American concept that our polity is based on a Creator who a) has made each us of equal worth and significance (ontological equality) and b) has endowed humanity with "certain unalienable rights," among them "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (please see the Declaration of Independence).

Nothing could be more mainstream American, therefore, than that public servants live in community with their Creator and with our fellow man, and then appreciate public service as a particular calling within that overarching, liberating, and humane vision.

America would be much improved if people we sent to Washington understood they are creatures of God and not of a materialistic secular state, or of impersonal nature, social classes, victim groups, or any other of the various divisive splinterings that seem so at home in certain political circles -- and yet so alien to who we are in our enduring national identity. 

Sharron Angle appears to be a person who embraces that general humane calling to live in community with our Creator and then to respond with specifity to her particular life situation. Therefore, she campaigns to unseat Harry Reid, a man who seems significantly alienated from the American experiment.  

That, and not ahistorical allegations of "conservative extremism," perhaps goes far in explaining the ire her work raises among secularized elites rather accustomed to imposing their extreme ideological agenda upon America unopposed. That Angle has a real shot at defeating the incumbent Reid only adds fuel to the ire.