The usual suspects are here. Black Converse high-tops, alternative tattoos, nerdy thick-rimmed glasses worn more as spectacle than as spectacles. People queue up at the bar the way they do on any other happening night to order watered-down mixed drinks and overpriced imported beer. The air is thick with the peculiar mixture of ambivalence and investment that accompanies cultural events in a college town. They want to be there, to be seen and heard, but they don’t want to be seen wanting that or anything else. They have come for the show, because it’s this week’s must-do, but most of them would rather become the show. Five minutes into the headliner’s set, they decide whether they are going to pay attention to their friends or the stage, whether the music will be background or foreground. You can watch them making up their minds. And then everything is suddenly fixed, like a photograph that can’t go back to being a blank, white sheet.

It’s the way things work in indie-label country. Every band that comes through town has a few “real” fans that can be relied upon for support. But the band has to play to the rest of the crowd if they want to sell enough merchandise to resupply themselves with spending money. And that means winning people over in those first five minutes. Some artists play their college radio “hit.” Some ignore the crowd altogether, in the not far-fetched assumption that people are more likely to pay attention to those who refuse to pay attention to them. Sufjan Stevens takes a markedly different approach. All at once, the stage fills with clean-cut men and women in matching blue outfits with orange letters. Put together, those letters spell “Illinois,” the title of his superb new album. It’s crowded on stage, mirroring the close quarters in the audience. Crowd regards crowd. Then the band launches into a cheer, all smiles and bounce. Their energy is infectious. But the immunity of the non-committal hipsters in the audience is strong.

When Stevens launches into the first song, though, a serious-minded number embellished with more instruments than fit comfortably on stage, the contrast between the band’s appearance and the music itself hooks people in. Except for the diehard devotees in the audience, no one is quite sure what to make of Stevens’s act. Is the cheerleading meant to be funny? Are the songs sincere? Does the tension between them create an irony that goes deeper than the superficial sort of concert-venue repartee? That’s how Stevens gets the hipsters to pay attention, finally. They feel the burden of making something of the show, but they struggle to figure out what, precisely, they are supposed to be making.

The banter and between-song cheers of Stevens’s band are so wholesome that they would seem fake, were it not for the moments of introspection in his songs. When he sings the haunting conclusion to Illinois’s “John Wayne Gacy,” “And in my best behavior/ I am really just like him/ Look beneath the floorboards/ For the secrets I have hid,” the orange-on-blue attire—the colors of the University of Illinois—and pom-pom twirls are reimagined as relatives of Gacy’s clown costume, grotesque in their forced buoyancy. It’s often difficult to hear lyrics in a live setting, but Stevens’s mountain-stream voice and burbling pace make it possible even for newcomers to his work to hear every word. And that gives his first-person singular special force. It’s one thing to hear someone sing “I” on a record, another entirely to experience that live. The line between singing in character and singing his character breaks down.

It is this confusion, however temporary, that perplexes Stevens’s listeners the most. Because over time, in the interstices both of elaborately wrought—and sometimes overwrought—compositions that can sound like Philip Glass’s attempt to become a pop musician, and of spare, whispery folk songs that cut the complexity of the former like lemon sorbet after a rich main course, he reveals something out of character with the circles he frequents. Stevens sings as a Christian. At first, members of his audience brush this realization aside. They are among hipsters, after all. Most of the people in this room devote their Saturday and Sunday mornings to servicing hangovers, not attending services. If they do believe in a higher power, it is a belief locked deep inside them, like a memory of early childhood that only comes out when they are mad or frightened or stoned. But as the clues pile up—references to divinity, righteousness, Bible study, Emanuel—they become impossible to ignore. Maybe Stevens is singing as someone other than himself, but if that is the case he shows a remarkable preference for first-person narrators who wear their religion, if not on the sleeve of their coat, then in the satiny lining inside it that flashes whenever they move.

Stevens does not proselytize. But his words and actions make it difficult to regard his first-person lyrics as out of character. Before he starts another song from Illinois, “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out To Get Us!”, he talks about going to summer camp as a child in Michigan. Someone in the crowd shouts out the name of a place. Stevens looks up, surprised. “That’s where I was. I can’t believe you’ve heard of it.” He pauses for a minute, smiling. “This song is really set there, but I had to move the story to the Palisades in Illinois for the sake of the album.” As the song begins, this confession gives the words the aura of a truth that transcends the domain of fiction. “Thinking outrageously I write in cursive/ I hide in my bed with the lights on the floor/ Wearing three layers of coats and leg warmers/ I see my own breath on the face of the door/ Oh, I am not quite sleeping, Oh, I am fast in bed / There on the wall in the bedroom, creeping/ I see a wasp with her wings outstretched.”

Like many of Stevens’s lyrics, these lines are simultaneously mundane and otherworldly, detailed and diffuse. Although there’s nothing overtly religious about them, they overlap so seamlessly with the ones that do make explicit Christian references that they acquire the inward glow of religious allegory. By prefacing the song with words that ground its imagery in a reality that he inhabits, Stevens puts his audience in the potentially uncomfortable position of concluding that the wall between the fiction of his songs and the fact of his life is a wall with a door locked only by their belief that a sophisticated independent-label musician, the darling of big-city critics, can’t really be the believer he seems to be.

It’s not necessary to attend a Sufjan Stevens concert to experience this sort of cognitive dissonance, of course. His albums Greetings From Michigan, the Great Lake State, and Illinois—the first fruits of a hopelessly ambitious plan to make a record for every one of the fifty states—resemble secular labors of love like The Magnetic Fields’ three-CD 69 Love Longs more than the fare at your standard Christian emporium. The illustrated booklets accompanying both records display a light-hearted faux primitive approach better suited to an art gallery than a church. The original cover for Illinois shows Al Capone, flying saucers, and Superman—Stevens’s label was encouraged to remove the Man of Steel from subsequent pressings —against a backdrop of the Chicago skyline. Inside, a row of Santas cavort with deer, butterflies, and an image of Stevens re-imagined as Abraham Lincoln. Michigan’s booklet devotes a full page to a field-guide painting of a robin with the caption “robin” beneath it, inspiring anyone who has seen David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet, itself a Moebius strip of irony and sincerity, to wonder whether anything on the record should be taken at face value. Like the cheerleading between songs during Stevens’s live show, these images circulate in a world where the absence of irony can only be registered as the most ironic irony of all.

That the impulse to look for hidden meanings should seem incompatible with Christian art is a sign, both of how far Fundamentalism has dumbed down the religion it claims to represent, and how much intellectuals’ defensive response to Fundamentalism has left them deaf to the spiritual traditions it distorts and suppresses. If Stevens does have an agenda, aside from making beautiful and moving art, it may be to wake his audience up to the dangers in that brand of mutual ignorance. Interviewed last summer by the Internet music site Pitchfork, he addressed the resistance that many people feel to the religious content of his work. “I think an enlightened person is capable, on some level, of making the distinction between the institution of the culture and the culture itself. The institution of Christianity, the way that it’s set up, it’s institutionalized and commodified, and anytime that happens, anytime it’s incorporated, it leads to disaster.” He notes, “I have the same knee-jerk reaction to that kind of culture. Maybe I’m a little more empathetic to it because we have similar fundamental beliefs. But culturally and aesthetically, some of it is really embarrassing.”

The real power of Stevens’s work, particularly in a live setting, is to take this embarrassment and turn it on its head, leaving the hipsters in his audience embarrassed at their own discomfort with religious conviction. In the process, he reveals their desire to remain non-committal as a reflex that retards both thinking and feeling. Commit to the music and you just may learn to commit to the spirituality that motivates it. It would surely be a lot more rewarding than sleeping off hipster hangovers.