Faith And The Fate Of A Nation

We read Scripture that holds both grief and hope together, then ask what it looks like to rebuild peace at home and courage in public life. We move from Proverbs and Acts to American history and end with a simple plea to turn back to God and pray for the country. 
• Psalm 126 as a lens for loss and restoration 
• a UK court case referenced as a warning about cultural direction 
• Proverbs on conflict in marriage and the cost of a contentious home 
• Acts 6 and why leaders protect prayer and teaching 
• Stephen as an example of grace under pressure 
• growth of mosques discussed as a sign of shifting influence 
• Medal of Honor story used to contrast duty and sacrifice 
• Gerald Ford’s oath and Proverbs 3 as public faith 
• “In God We Trust” history traced back to the 1860s 
• a closing image about God giving the nation another chance 
If you are looking for a family-friendly middle grade series, if you would check out Countryside… And same thing for the podcast… if you could leave a review wherever you listen… And if you have five or ten dollars a month, there’s a link where you can set up that monthly donation… And also, if you get a chance, you can join us over on America’s Christian Heritage Podcast… Pray for America, folks. 

#ChristianNation

#AmericanHeritage

#InGodWeTrust

Transcript

Psalm 126 And A Shocking Case

SPEAKER_02 0:01

Psalm 126 Starting with verse 4 Restore our fortunes, Lord, as streams renew the desert. Those who plant in tears will harvest with shouts of joy. They weep as they go to plant their seed, but they sing as they return with the harvest. Last week, I guess, June 25th, 2026, at the Hull Crown Court in the UK. There were three Afghan Muslim nationals. Hamdad, Naserai, and Aka Hell, all in early twenties from Wakefield and parts of Hull.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

And they groomed, arranged, exploited a young girl over several months. Pornography.

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Indecent photo of a child. I can't remember how old this girl was.

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Sixteen. Sixteen. Islam, folks.

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That's all that awaits our wives and daughters if we allow, continue to allow Islam, followers of Islam, inside of Christian nations. That's it.

Welcome And Opening Prayer

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Hey folks, this is Jesse Cope back with another episode of the American Soul Podcast. Hope y'all are going well, wherever y'all are, whatever part of the day you're in, sure to appreciate you joining me, giving me a little bit of your time and attention, a little piece of your day. I will try and use it wisely. For those of y'all who continue to share the podcast with others and tell others about it, thank you. For those of y'all who continue to pray for me and for the podcast, thank you very much. Very much need your prayers and want them. For those of y'all who join us over on the America's Christian Heritage Podcast, sister podcast of this one once every couple weeks. I'm glad to see you there. Hope you're enjoying it. And for those of y'all who have checked out the Countryside Book Series, thank you for that too. So very grateful for y'all and your support and your prayers. Father, thank you for today. Thank you for you, Father, and your son, Jesus Christ, and your Holy Spirit. Thank you for your love and your mercy, your grace and your forgiveness of sins through the merit of your son, Jesus Christ.

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For all your many blessings, Father, the ones we admit and the ones we don't for whatever reason. Guide our steps.

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Help us to love you with our whole heart, mind, soul, and strength to love our neighbors as ourselves. Be with those listening to the podcast, wherever they are, whatever part of the day they're in. Bless their marriages. Children if they have them, their families, their nation. Comfort those who are anxious, scared, alone. Be with those who are abused, who are hurt, who are suffering for the name of your son Jesus Christ. Help us to care for them, to support them, to encourage them. Ourselves as well, each other, Father.

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Be with our leaders in the pulpit and in the state, give them wisdom and courage.

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Be with those who go out and work on our infrastructure, our roads, our power lines, sewers, etc. Be with their families. Give them courage and strength, perseverance. Our military law enforcement, firefighters, EMS. And God, my words, here, Father, please. Your son's name we pray. Amen.

Proverbs On Marriage And Peace

SPEAKER_02 4:20

Marriage versus for today. We're gonna come back, uh, we're gonna compare something and come back to this whole court case. That's H-U-L-L that we talked about earlier in a minute. Proverbs 21-9, 25-24, better to live on the edge of a roof than when a contentious woman in a large house. Better to live on a corner of the roof than share a house with a quarrelsome wife. It's just not peaceful, folks. It just takes the joy out of the marriage, out of the home. And you can see it, you see it, notice it. It's easy to notice when you look at those couples where the woman is quarrelsome, opinionated, contentious, argumentative. There's there's no happiness there. There's no peace there. It's interesting. I was reading a book the other day. It was a fiction book, and it started talking about how the main male character really wanted this woman who was strongly opinionated and independent, et cetera, et cetera. And it just made me laugh to myself when I was reading it. I was going, this author, she was a female. Obviously, has no clue about what the priorities are for a man at home. Peace, gentleness, um, raising the family, keeping the home, physical satisfaction, submission to authority. But that doesn't sell today. At any rate, whatever, wherever you're getting your marriage advice from, folks, as always, it better line up with God.

Acts 6 Leadership Under Pressure

SPEAKER_02 6:10

Acts 6, 1 through 15. But as the believers rapidly multiplied, there were rumblings of discontent. The Greek-speaking believers complained about the Hebrew-speaking believers, saying that their widows were being discriminated against in the daily distribution of food. So the twelve called a meeting of all the believers. They said, We apostles should spend our time teaching the word of God, not running a food program. And so, brothers, select seven men who are well respected and are full of the spirit and wisdom. We will give them this responsibility. Then we apostles can spend our time in prayer and teaching the word. Everyone liked this idea, and they chose the following Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit, Philip, Procurus, Niconor, Timon, Permenus, and Nicholas of Antioch, an earlier convert to the Jewish faith. These seven were presented to the apostles who prayed for them as they laid their hands on them. So God's message continued to spread, the number of believers greatly increasing in Jerusalem, and many of the Jewish priests were converted too. Stephen, a man full of God's grace and power, performed amazing miracles and signs among the people. But one day some men from the synagogue of freed slaves, as it was called, started to debate with him. They were Jews from Cyrene, Alexandria, Cilicia, and the province of Asia. None of them could stand against the wisdom and the spirit with which Stephen spoke. So they persuaded some men to lie about Stephen, saying, We heard him blaspheme Moses and even God. This roused the people, the elders, and the teachers of religious law, so they arrested Stephen and brought him before the High Council. The lying witnesses said, This man is always speaking against the holy temple and against the law of Moses. We have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy the temple and change the customs Moses handed down to us. At this point, everyone in the High Council stared at Stephen because his face became as bright as an angel's Psalm one hundred twenty six, one through six. When the Lord brought back the exiles to Jerusalem, it was like a dream. We were filled with laughter and we sang for joy. And the other nations said, What amazing things the Lord has done for them. Yes, the Lord has done amazing things for us. What joy. Restore our fortunes, Lord, as streams renew the desert. Those who plant in tears will harvest with shouts of joy. They weep as they go to plant their seed, but they sing as they return with the harvest. Proverbs sixteen, twenty six through twenty seven. It is good for workers to have an appetite, an empty stomach drives them on. Scoundrels create trouble. Their words are a destructive blaze.

Books Podcast Reviews And Support

SPEAKER_02 9:02

If you are looking for a family-friendly middle grade series, if you would check out Countryside, there's two books in the series so far, kind of like Narnia, The Hobbit, Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, Fablehaven, if you enjoy those. I think you will enjoy these, this series. And if you do enjoy it, if you'd leave a review online somewhere, that helps a great deal. There's paperback, hardback, ebook link. There's a link in the show notes where you can find them. And same thing for the podcast. If you feel like you're getting something out of it, if you could leave a review wherever you listen to the podcast, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever. And if you have five or ten dollars a month, there's a link where you can set up that monthly donation, and that helps a great deal. And also, if you get a chance, you can join us over on America's Christian Heritage Podcast. We produce that once every two weeks. And hopefully you'll you'll get something out of that. It's a little deeper dive into the connection between the foundation of America and the principles of Jesus Christ in the Bible. So appreciate any or all of that.

Mosque Growth And Cultural Warnings

SPEAKER_02 10:15

So what I wanted to tie back are just some statistics. Think about the court case that we talked at the beginning, the three Muslim men that raped the little girl, and how often we talk about that, right? Pretty much every day on the podcast, we've got some example of that or something like it. And so the interesting thing was the growth of mosques in the United States. And I'm sure the trend is similar in Europe and the UK. But for example, in 2000, there were about 1,200 mosques. 2010, there were about 2100, a 74% increase. 2020, there were a little over 2,700, a 31% increase from 2010. And then 2025, 2026, estimates range from 3,100 to 3,900, almost 4,000. What you need to know if you don't is that each one of those mosques is like a little hub, a node, a center for spreading the tenets, the pillars of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. And regardless of what you want to say, what anybody says, what those teachings lead to year after year, decade after decade, century after century, is rape, pillage, plunder, destruction, particularly of Christian society, Christian nations, right? You go back and you look at the left loves to use the uh Treaty of Triple E, right? John Adams' comment that we were in no way a Christian nation as some kind of gotcha moment. The problem, of course, is they're really ignorant of the whole treaty. They take a few words out of one sentence, not even the complete sentence, out of one paragraph out of the entire treaty. And what Adams really meant is, hey, we're not a Christian nation like those old nations in Europe. We're not going to go to war with you just because you're Muslim. We just want to be a Christian nation and live in peace. And of course, the problem with that is the Muslims are never going to allow it to begin with. But the Muslims don't have that mentality. They actively and openly call for the destruction of any who are not Muslims. And you see this consistently today. You see it constantly in Western civilization and Europe and the U.K. and America. There was a lady, shockingly, a female that's running, either running or elected somewhere, I think on the East Coast. And she made the comment that in Shallah, God wills it, I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that our faith is respected and increased in the United States. But you cannot have a Christian society and a Muslim society together inside the same country in the United States. It's not going to work. You won't have any liberty left. All you're doing is setting up your wives and your daughters for rape and slavery and your sons for slavery and death. That's it. So the mosque estimates, I think, really ought to wake a lot of people up. There's going to have to come a point, folks, where we choose whether we're going to have a Christian nation or a communist/slash Muslim, because those go hand in glove. They always work together. Stalin worked with the Muslims. Hitler and the Nazis worked with the Muslims. China's working with the Muslims. You know, they they persecute the Muslims inside China, but they work with Muslims outside the country. Right. And so I've heard people that red green alliance, right, communism, Islam, and it is. It always goes together. Those evils go together.

Honor Service And Christian Heritage

SPEAKER_02 14:14

Medal of Honor for today, Thomas Joseph Callan, also known as Callun, Private Indian Campaigns, Bravo Company, 7th U.S. Cavalry, U.S. Army, June 25th to 26th, 1876, Little Bighorn, Montana. Volunteered and succeeded in obtaining water for the wounded of the command. Also displayed conspicuously good conduct in assisting to drive away the Indians. Accredited to Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, not awarded posthumously, presented October 24, 1896. Born July 13, 1853, Ireland, died March 5, 1908, buried Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, MH 18 Tech 5, East Orange, New Jersey. Another great example of the vast difference in the quality of immigrant that we have gotten in the past in this country versus what we are getting today. There's no way I'm going to get through all this today, folks, uh on the podcast. We're going to do the best we can, though. All right, so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to read one of the uh presidential oath of office. This is Gerald R. Ford, Proverbs 3, 5, and 6, as he took the presidential oath of office in 1974. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. And all your ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct your paths. One of my all-time favorites. And when people tell you we're not a Christian nation, you can just start pointing to the fact that our leaders put their hand on the Bible, refer to God when they're taking the oath of office. And folks, any of the current officials that have been appointed or elected that have put their hand on something else like a Quran or they're not legitimate. And that'll come out someday. It's coming. But they're not legitimate. So one of the things that people love to complain about on the left is the in God We Trust. And they say, oh, hey, we, you know, we didn't have that until the 1950s on our money, on our right. Well, the reality is much different than the left likes to say, as is the case so often. We've started putting In God We Trust on coins all the way back in the 1860s during the Civil War. And so it's there's a great, if you get a chance, American Patriots Bible has a little section on it. I bet America's Founders Bible does, and the America's God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotes also does, has uh some really good examples of these coins. For example, uh on the two cent coin in 1864, and then silver dollar, half-dollar coin, quarter dollar coin, nickel, three cent coin beginning in 1866. They actually took the motto off of gold coins in 1907, but the public criticism was so great that in 1908, and God We Trust was made mandatory on all coins, which it had previously appeared. And then in 1955, July the 11th, uh it was made mandatory on all coins and paper currency. And then July 30th, 1956, Congress made that the national motto, right? And then, of course, we started after 1947, which occurred before this, we we started trying to kick God out of the country. And so in the 70s, we started to get legal challenges against this. One of them, the atheist Madeline Murray O'Hare. Thankfully, the federal courts rejected her argument at that point. There's a really neat little bit of history I think we'll go into on the next podcast because we're already over. And it's Samuel Portland or Salomon Portland Chase, who was uh Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He was uh senator, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under President Lincoln, Governor of Ohio, uh, and he was involved in this back in the 1860s. And so I think we will come back and read some of his quotes on the next podcast.

One More Day Of Summer

SPEAKER_02 18:53

I wanted to end with one quote out of a movie, actually, and that is if you're familiar, it's a Kevin Costner movie for Love of the Game back from 1999. And there's a broadcaster, a man playing a broadcaster on the movie, talking about this baseball game. And this old pitcher, who Costner is Billy Chapel in the game, if you don't know it, is trying to get a perfect game. Uh, and his body's starting to kind of fall apart, and this broadcaster makes the comment. And tonight, I think he might be able to use that aching old arm one more time to push the sun back up in the sky and give us one more day of summer. And I think we've got a real good chance, folks, if we will simply turn back to God and Jesus Christ, of God giving this old country one more shot, one more chance to push the sun back up in the sky, and give us a little bit longer as a Christian republic that spreads liberty and most importantly the gospel of Jesus Christ around the world. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not to temptation, but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen. God bless y'all, God bless your families, your marriages if you're married, your children if you have them, your nation, wherever you are around the world listening, be sure to appreciate y'all joining us. Pray for America, folks. Pray for yourselves, your families, your marriages, your kids, but pray for America. We are the last best hope, as Lincoln and so many others have said, of the world because of God and Jesus Christ.

SPEAKER_01 21:06

God bless y'all. We'll talk again later. Looking forward to it.