NEW YORK — Mayor Eric Adams and dozens of faith leaders held a Christian praise rally in City Hall Park on Thursday — an event that featured Adams invoking the apostles as justification for his policy of removing homeless encampments from city streets.
“We are on the wrong road as a city. We have tolerated homelessness, walked past our brothers and sisters who are living in tents on the street, and we’ve normalized it,” he said. “I can’t help but to believe that if Matthew, Mark, Luke and John was here today, he would be on the streets with me, helping people get out of encampments.”
Adams has come under fire for his removal of encampments since his policy came to light two weeks ago. Since then opponents of his decision have called it inhumane and counterproductive, arguing that it’s no way to persuade people who are fearful of staying in homeless shelters that are often dangerous.
Councilman Lincoln Restler, a Democrat, said Thursday that removing the encampments “without a tangible, safe housing solution is totally unacceptable.”
“I’m a Jew,” he said. “But as I understand it, Jesus was about helping the poor and helping those most in need. Throwing homeless people’s belongings away without providing them a safe place to live seems like the opposite of what Jesus would have done.”
The prayer rally, just steps from City Hall, came a day after the New York Police Department cleared homeless encampments in the East Village, throwing tents and other belongings into garbage trucks and arresting seven people as part of their sweep. It came two days after the City Council’s progressive caucus, which represents a majority of the body’s membership, denounced the sweeps and called on Adams to end the policy.
“By demolishing these street encampments, the mayor is telling people, many of whom have nowhere else to go, that they don’t belong,” the caucus said in a statement put out Tuesday.
Adams, though, has continued to double down on the rhetoric when it comes to encampments and has framed their removal as a civic and moral responsibility.
On Thursday, he made it about faith, and he did so with an event that one longtime political observer described as unprecedented in its religiosity.
“This is a very unique thing,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime political consultant and Orthodox Jewish rabbi. “It’s common for the mayor to go to church. It’s not common to have a revival meeting in City Hall Park.”
However unique it might be, politically it makes sense for Adams, according to Sheinkopf.
“The whole argument he has is he’s the unifier and anyone who’s against him is trying to divide the city,” he said. “He’s telling people, ‘We are a city of religion. We are a city of purpose. It’s the religion of New York by Eric Adams.”
Indeed, Adams has suggested before that New Yorkers have lost faith and need to “believe.”
On Thursday, we was accompanied by NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell and Schools Chancellor David Banks, and appeared to speak for them and himself when he said, “we are saying it’s time to pray.”
“I believe in the power of prayer,” he said. “And I am unapologetic about it.”
He then cast the city’s faith groups as a kind of early warning system when it comes to society’s ills, saying that religious leaders often become aware of problems before they become apparent to government.
“That’s why, as the mayor of the city of New York, we’re tearing down the walls that divide the knowledge of our faith-based institutions and this administration,” he said. “We are in this together, and that’s the only way we are going to get out of it.”
