Mumford & Sons have long occupied a curious liminal space between the sacred and secular; their unrepentantly earnest, banjo-flanged sound — prone to uplifting, folksy flourishes and pious proclamations about love and light — often seems bent on marrying the two, chasing traces of the divine within the ingenuous, gale-force energy of four British lads plowing away on amped-up acoustic mainstays.
Perhaps the larger point of songs like “Guiding Light,” “Little Lion Man,” and “Babel” — the oeuvre-encompassing trio with which frontman Marcus Mumford and his bandmates opened their sold-out TD Garden set Sunday night — is that there's scant reason to separate the credo and crises of self-belief at the heart of much modern pop from other, decidedly sectarian forms of faith. Religion’s more often than not written between the lines, anyway.
What Mumford & Sons have done exceptionally well across the past decade, then, is craft sonic sermons that preach to the widest-possible audience, songs that don’t directly exalt in religiosity so much as recognize the omniscience of its precepts in everyday life and channel those into something with unifying appeal.
And so it was fitting that, for the stadium-sized “Delta” tour (named for their fourth and latest album, from which they mined six in the 19-song set), Mumford & Sons played beneath a dynamic lighting rig that descended, raised, and rippled throughout, a hazily heaven-sent presence in the arena that bathed the band members in blue-white shafts. Though simple compared with the in-arena architecture orchestrated by some pop stars, it was the showiest adornment in a set that sought to embrace more than engulf, non-denominational Father Mumford throwing open the church doors and inviting each and every audience member inside.
Whether getting behind the drums for “Lover of the Light,” letting his hardwearing baritone grow unusually vulnerable on “The Wild,” or running into the loge sections and pit as the proverbial sons powered through “Ditmas,” Mumford made for a suitably spirited cynosure; the frontman somehow found time — and the stones — to crack a joke about the Patriots’ loss earlier that day, a bid for regional awareness that seemed to go over well with the enthusiastic crowd. Even so, he struggled at times to fill the band’s odd rectangular stage, a ship-like structure with a lowered central platform and two raised sides that occasionally trapped him singing to isolated pockets of the arena. Communal catharsis is much more the Mumford ethos; it was powerful to watch the four huddled close together, on a side stage for the stripped-down “Ghosts That We Knew,” then later on “Timshel,” done a cappella around one microphone.
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Well-picked opener Maggie Rogers — a dream-folk innovator rapidly expanding her own flock — rejoined the band for “Awake My Soul,” a welcome surprise in an evening that contained few. Mumford’s catalog is crowded with old-fashioned foot-stompers, and the band was in fine, familiar form racing through the most anthemic among them, from jangling “Roll Away Your Stone” to penultimate roof-raiser “I Will Wait.” Newer, more experimental material proved more hit-and-miss; “Darkness Visible” was an impressively heavy-duty garage-rock detour, complete with dissonant guitar wails, but closing number “Delta” lingered too long to stop less fervent believers in the Garden from ditching Mumford’s Mass a few minutes early.
MUMFORD & SONS
With Maggie Rogers. At TD Garden, Sunday
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Isaac Feldberg can be reached by email at isaac.feldberg@globe.com, or on Twitter at @isaacfeldberg.