If you search for “Julien Baker” on YouTube, you will quickly find yourself in a corner of the Internet that feels as quiet and cool as a medieval cloister, where a young woman sings folk canticles alone, with her eyes closed. That Baker always sings like she is trying to bounce her voice off the walls of a cathedral is intentional: she believes in God, says she has “encountered the tangible manifestation of God,” and says that she tries to leave space for God to enter the room whenever she opens up her throat. In the months since her début album, “Sprained Ankle,” was released, last October, a kind of digital cottage industry has sprung up around the twenty-year-old singer; it involves putting Baker in a space—any space—alone with her guitar and filming what happens. There are videos online of her singing in a library, in a fluorescent parking garage, on top of crumbling stadium bleachers, in an empty dive bar. All of these quotidian places become temporarily sacrosanct when Baker is performing in them; the raw purity of her vocalise seems to convert the everyday into the divine. With Baker in the frame, any parking lot can revert into a paradise.

Baker, who is currently on a tour through the U.S. and Europe (she played New York’s Bowery Ballroom this week, and will play the festival circuit this summer), also turns concert venues into sacred spaces. When she is onstage, the audience goes hushed, reverential. The only sounds you hear between songs are her fingers as she tweaks the tuning on her electric guitar, scattered whispers between friends, and the rustling as the crowd waits patiently for Baker to start strumming again. She never asks for this quiet from the pit, it just seems to coalesce around her. Baker herself is shy, squeaky, small of stature—an introverted pip in plaid shirts with a Memphis twang and a nervous stutter. But her music seems to demand a certain kind of pin-drop attention the moment she starts to shake her voice loose, flinging it up to the rafters of her range. That voice is tonally bright and free of flourish (she has no vibrato, no scale runs), but also forceful enough to trumpet the high notes without ever breaking, and the combined effect can sound like someone pleading for answers at the top of her lungs. Perhaps the audience goes mute out of discretion; Baker’s voice is so exposed that listeners wonder if they are even supposed to be in the room. It’s easy to feel, watching her, as if you have walked in on a private act, a girl and her guitar in secret communion. She makes you feel like an interloper, eavesdropping on someone else’s prayers.

These religious tensions are all over Baker’s music; she put them up front in her lyrics, and she speaks about them to anyone who asks. Baker was raised in a deeply Christian household in one of the most Christian parts of the country—Memphis, Tennessee—and she watched as several of her friends were dismissed or sent away from the church community after not conforming to its strict standards. She saw one friend shipped off to Refuge (formerly known as Love in Action), a now-defunct camp designed to “cleanse homosexuals” of their queerness, through Bible study. Baker knew that she herself was gay while this was happening, and acutely remembers the clammy-palm anxiety she felt when she came out to her parents, at seventeen.

Instead of turning her away, however, Baker found that her family was suddenly, radically accepting. She told one reporter that her father took a Bible down from a shelf and spent the next hour finding scripture to support her, to prove that she was not going to Hell. It was in this moment that Baker confirmed her belief in God, though not in the judgmental being she had been raised to fear and hide herself from. Instead, she saw her new conviction through the lens of Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”: “It’s like that part of the novel where the people in the town forget everything and someone puts up a sign that says ‘God Exists,’ ” she said, on the phone from her dorm room at Middle Tennessee State University, where she is studying literature with a double minor in Spanish and Secondary Education. “That’s what my tattoo says. ‘God Exists.’ ” Baker engages with her reaffirmed faith in “Rejoice,” a soaring three-minute ode to belief that has become the climax of her live set, and which she calls her “mission statement, if I have one.” She begins the song humming about her fellow burnout peers (“All of my friends live in a plastic bag walking around / Jumping the train tracks, over the fence, veins all black”), but ends it by saying that they will all be redeemed, no matter what dumb mistakes they make or immature foolishness they pull. There will be a millennial deliverance: “But I think there’s a God, and he hears either way / When I rejoice and complain.” She closes out the song by singing the word “rejoice” again and again, right up against the crack in her register, whipping up the crowd into a tent revival of the heart. “Ultimately, I feel like there is just a pervasive evidence of God, “ she said, plainly. “Though I know that is maybe a controversial thing to say.”

There is equal humility and precocity to these statements, a duality that kept popping up in my conversation with Baker. She called me “ma’am” with a soft drawl, and apologized often when talking about her creative process, worrying that she was being “conceited or indulgent.” Onstage, she offers aw-shucks-ish disclaimers before launching into particularly gloomy refrains, saying, “I’m sorry for bumming everyone out.” At shows, she sometimes wears a T-shirt that says “Sad Songs Make Me Feel Better.” And yet, despite any outward embarrassment, Baker’s lyrics are bold and unapologetic—about having big, bloody emotions, about the kind of epic feels that come in tsunamis and do not abate. Though Baker sings about God, she is not explicitly a Christian artist; instead, whether or not a supreme being exists is just one of many questions she has about the way the world works, and about the mechanisms available to us to process pain.

Baker perseverates on ideas in her songs, digging into open wounds in verbal loops. Still, she keeps her emotional gushing from seeming decadent by winking at her masochistic tendencies. In the first line of “Sprained Ankle,” she sighs, “Wish I could write songs about anything other than death.” Lyrically, Baker sounds like a modern-day Esther Greenwood, rattling around inside her own bell jar, looking for clarity. She wears her anxiety like a shield, but one that she knows doesn’t quite fit. In “Everybody Does,” her most popular song online, she warbles, “I know I’m a pile of filthy wreckage you will wish you’d never touched / But you’re gonna run when you find out who I am / It’s alright, everybody does.” Baker realizes that her sensitivity can feel like too much, a weight that she doesn’t want to put on others. But she is also able to laugh at that weight, at the humanity of it. And she also assures herself and others that, spiritually, she is allowed an unburdening. Baker asserts, over and over again, that even if everyone runs, we are never truly alone.