After a bit of research and working with the plugin author there is no easy solution to get the dates to show up as dates versus text. His solution is that a WP_Query can be used to display the posts to order by meta value, where the meta value is interpreted as a date.
This still does not work. If I put the id of the view (5971), the page where the view's content template is suppose to show does not even render. If I put the id of the content template (5972) the page renders but the content is still not sorted correctly.
Any other ideas or can you go in and see what might be wrong ? This seems like such a simple thing that is just causing such an issue.