Bill T. Jones tapped enthusiastically into a vein of agit-prop on Tuesday night in “Blind Date,” presented at the Lincoln Center Festival. Mr. Jones takes aim at current American foreign policy, but is even more critical of religious fundamentalism as an insidious ill in our body politic. The primary audience for “Blind Date” will be those with whom his sentiments resonate, but it is possible to enjoy this performance piece without ideological commitment.

“Blind Date” is loud and vehement. Mr. Jones and his troupe, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, give us the fast pace and combustible energy of a three-ring circus.The booming soundtrack, which includes original music by Daniel Bernard Roumain, transforms the theater into an echo chamber. Catch phrases repeat cyclically and recur like musical motifs or incantatory reinforcement. Texts appear projected on screen, and performers recite passages from them again and again. On the stage, partitioned with ever-mobile ingenuity, individuals dance in front of screens and step in and out of ambulatory frames, their movement echoed by shadowy presences behind them. Mr. Jones uses every possible theatrical modality to lend his messages replication and formal refractions.

Mr. Jones himself dominates the proceedings. The piece opens as he stands, smoking, on stage. “I know what you’re thinking, but I’m going to cut down,” his taped voice proclaims. “And with the Lord’s help I will cut down.” His words are a delicious send-up of politicians’ audacious appropriation of deities who confer unqualified approval on their political choices, as well as of the habit of ordinary individuals to cede responsibility for every decision, large or small, to an almighty. Later in “Blind Date,” Mr. Jones gives a rendition of the cynical Irish war lament “Mrs. McGrath” and mocks his ideological adversaries’ slogans and tactics, asking the audience, “Are you with us or not?”

Though “Blind Date” is better classified as performance art than as dance, Mr. Jones solves with dexterity the question of how to present dance in a text-driven work. His dancers illustrate and amplify the texts, and sometimes provide the formal kinetic quotient that today’s aesthetic demands, demonstrating as it does an enduring belief in the primary of dance for dance’s sake.

But the movement stays rooted to humanistic concerns. For instance, in a recurring compositional element in which the dancers yell “me,” instantly collapse, and then are ministered to and resurrected by colleagues, Mr. Jones illustrates the interdependency of all human existence as a reproof to factionalism. The sequence has the childlike flavor of a “Ring Around the Rosie,” but also underlines the fall as both an essential element of dance vocabulary and a universal expression of human mortality.

Mr. Jones’s audience comes to his work to be roused, but also to be diverted.”Blind Date” tells us the state of the world is dire. That’s hardly news, but it is an oppressive declaration nonetheless.Thankfully, Mr. Jones knows when to interject zaniness to break the tension: The stage erupts when one of the dancers gives the full rhythm and blues treatment to Otis Redding’s “Security,” snatches of which have floated onstage at intervals.

Mr. Jones targets the government’s exploitation of the poor as cannon fodder in a mock video commercial that recounts the fate of an urban youth who dressed as a duck to work at an innercity burger parlor before himself turning into a sitting duck for military recruitment. Later, Mr. Jones pilots across the stage a float made to look like a bloodied duck.

Throughout “Blind Date,” Mr. Jones is both funny and authoritative. At times he is a Biblical patriarch delivering a thunderous denunciation of the Pharisees; at other times, he becomes a farcical turn-of-the-20th-century drawing room raissoneur, into whose mouth he has placed the moral he wishes amplified.

“Blind Date” runs until July 20 (Lincoln Center, 212-721-6500). Lincoln Center Festival until July 30.