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"Are you a cop?"

The guy sitting next to me at Chicago's Riviera Theater had just taken a big hit from his pipe. My sense of smell told me he wasn't smoking tobacco.

"No," I said. "But if I were, you'd be in deep weeds, wouldn't you?"

The guy half-smiled and turned back to his pipe.

Meanwhile on stage, some dude was screaming enough profanities to make Eminem proud. The guy—the lead singer for the extremely hard rock band (hed)pe—wore those creepy white contact lenses you see in scary movies when actors want to look, well, downright devilish. If he was going for the demonic look, he succeeded. Chillingly.

Hmm, I thought, am I in the right place?

Yes I was. Because in a few minutes, another band would take the stage. The band I'd come to see. The rap metal band that's rocking the secular world like no other Christian band has ever rocked it before.

The band?

Payable On Death, better known as P.O.D.

A few weeks before that Chicago gig, P.O.D.'s record company had sent me a video titled, "P.O.D.—Impacting the Culture." A picture on the cover showed the band praying before a concert. Other shots showed them with Carson Daly on MTV's Total Request Live, with Bill Maher on ABC's Politically Incorrect, and with Matt Pinfield on USA's Farmclub.com—shows that reach millions of viewers each week.

The video included clips of P.O.D. sharing their faith on those shows—indeed, as the title promised, impacting the culture. When their video "Rock the Party" hit No. 1 on MTV's TRL last summer, Daly mentioned P.O.D.'s strong faith, to which drummer Noah "Wuv" Bernardo replied, "People know we're down for what we believe in."

Hardly the blatant evangelism of Billy Graham, but lead singer Sonny Sandoval took it a step further when a TRL viewer asked, "How does it feel to know that your spiritual message is getting out to everybody?"

With more than a million viewers watching, Sonny said, "That's the best feeling, no matter how many records we sell, whether we're on MTV or not. … People tell us our music makes them feel good about themselves, and that they're letting God do things in their lives. That's success for us, you know what I'm saying?"

P.O.D.'s message has reached millions more through the pages of Rolling Stone and Teen People. The band was a runaway winner in fan voting for "People of the Year" in Rolling Stone, which quoted Wuv as saying: "We come from the streets, dude, and we bring it to the kids tastefully. We don't come off all TV-evangelistic. That's how the world stereotypes Christians. We're just real people who love God." Teen People describes P.O.D. as "devout Christians whose beliefs infiltrate their aggressive brand of metal-rap."

But P.O.D. spreads the word through more than interviews. The main medium for the message is the music, especially their platinum CD, The Fundamental Elements of Southtown (a reference to the neighborhood in San Diego where Sonny, Wuv and guitarist Marcos Curiel grew up). A sampling of Southtown's lyrics:

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