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The last patients have been discharged from the Central Park field hospital run by Samaritan’s Purse, the evangelical organization led by the Rev. Franklin Graham. Its white tents will soon be dismantled and sent to new makeshift coronavirus wards as far away as Ecuador and Alaska.
Doctors and nurses from Samaritan’s Purse treated more than 300 New Yorkers after Mount Sinai Health System invited the group to the city at the height of the pandemic, but its work has been dogged by controversy since it began.
In an interview on Thursday amid empty tents, Mr. Graham said the decision to leave New York had been motivated by falling infection numbers, not by politics. But he expressed pique at his critics, who he said had been “a distraction” from the work of saving lives.
The presence of Samaritan’s Purse in one of the country’s most liberal cities kindled a culture war in New York’s coronavirus response, drawing criticism from elected officials, religious leaders and L.G.B.T. groups unnerved by Mr. Graham’s past statements on Islam and gay issues, as well as by a requirement that the organization’s employees be Christians who oppose same-sex marriage.
Critics have included members of the Episcopal clergy, whose objections to the group’s position on gay issues and non-Christian faiths helped scrap a proposed field hospital inside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and the speaker of the City Council, Corey Johnson. He described Mr. Graham on Twitter as “notoriously bigoted” and said the group’s “continued presence here is an affront to our values of inclusion.”
Mr. Graham disputed Mr. Johnson’s sentiments.
“New York is — how many million people live here?” Mr. Graham said. “There’s not one set of values that represents nine million people. I think that’s just ludicrous to me even make a statement like that.”
Mr. Graham, 67, said he had piloted one of the organization’s Dassault Falcon planes to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey from North Carolina early Thursday morning to thank staff members and meet Mount Sinai officials.
The son of Billy Graham, and one of the leading figures in evangelical Christianity, Mr. Graham said that New Yorkers and conservative Evangelical Christians shared many values, including “our love of freedom, our love of country, our love of God.”
Much of the criticism of Samaritan’s Purse stems from the group’s requirement that employees and volunteers sign a statement of faith affirming their belief in Jesus Christ and their view that “marriage is exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female.”
Mr. Graham defended that requirement on Thursday, saying it was important to ensure that “our work and our presence is united.”
Bishop Andrew M.L. Dietsche of the Episcopal Diocese of New York said that that attitude was a “key” reason the plan to set up a field hospital inside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine had been shelved last month.
He said Mr. Graham espouses “an exclusionary view and a very narrow view of what constitutes being a Christian.”
The statement of faith would have made it impossible for non-Christians to work in the cathedral, he said. It would also have required Episcopalians to “repudiate all the good work that’s been done in the Diocese of New York around the full inclusion of gay and lesbian people.”
“Most of the members of my own churches in the Diocese of New York would not have been able to sign off on that creedal statement and would therefore not be invited or permitted to participate in that ministry inside their own cathedral,” the bishop said.
On Friday afternoon, the City’s Commission on Human Rights closed an investigation into the hospital after finding no evidence it had discriminated against patients, according to its press secretary, Alicia McCauley.
The field hospital opened on April 1 and received the vast majority of its patients from Mount Sinai’s hard-hit community hospital in Queens. Samaritan’s Purse personnel treated 333 patients in New York, 190 at the tent hospital and the rest inside two Mount Sinai hospitals, said Melissa Strickland, a spokeswoman.
Mr. Graham said that he had budgeted $1.8 million a month to run the hospital and that his organization’s request that its employees be exempted from state and local income taxes while working in New York City had been declined.
He said no workers at the field hospital had been infected by the coronavirus, which he attributed to safety measures the group adopted in treating disease outbreaks overseas, including Ebola. His employees are being asked to self-quarantine for 14 days when they return home.
He said Samaritan’s Purse had never denied care to anyone because of a difference of belief, overseas or in New York.
But some New Yorkers have been skeptical. The organization’s slogan, “Helping in Jesus’ name,” was on trucks outside the field hospital, and Mr. Graham delivered an Easter sermon on Fox News from the site.
Some have also expressed alarm about Mr. Graham’s past statements and political activities. He is a vocal supporter of President Trump, a role that has made some Evangelicals uncomfortable, and has a long history of negative remarks about L.G.B.T. people and Muslims.
Mr. Graham, in a 2001 interview, described Islam as “a very evil and wicked religion.” Later, he falsely suggested that President Barack Obama was secretly a Muslim, fanning the “birther” conspiracy theory that asserted that Mr. Obama was not an American citizen.
Ann Northrop, a member of the Reclaim Pride Coalition, which has organized protests of Samaritan’s Purse, said Mr. Graham’s group had made many L.G.B.T. New Yorkers feel “personally attacked and personally at risk.”
“Just because they say that they wouldn’t recoil or try to proselytize you or start praying over you loudly about how Jesus will change you or save you, all of this comes to mind whether it is an actual possibility or not,” Ms. Northrop said.
Mr. Graham said he held no ill will toward gay people.
“I would want the gay community to know that I’m not here condemning them at all,” he said. “Just because I don’t agree doesn’t mean I’m against them.”
Jason Kaplan, a spokesman for Mount Sinai, said in a statement that Samaritan’s Purse had agreed to adhere to the hospital network’s anti-discrimination policies.
Samaritan’s Purse provides both medical and spiritual aid to the sick, Mr. Graham said. Roughly 5 percent of its budget is spent on “direct evangelism,” such as printing materials or church-based programs, Ms. Strickland said. But she said it was difficult to separate medical and missionary activities because the group’s medical work was vital to spreading a message of Christ’s love.
The organization’s website says that “the primary mission of Samaritan’s Purse is to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Spiritual aid might take the form of medical workers praying with patients, Mr. Graham said.
“Of course you have these sick people that you’re trying to save,” he said. “Many of our nurses and doctors just quietly prayed for them. Sometimes they asked, ‘Do you want us to pray?’ Every one of them wanted prayer. There wasn’t anyone said, ‘No, don’t pray for me.’”
But Mr. Graham said his staff “never prayed for anybody that didn’t want it.”
“Excuse me, let me say that differently,” he said. “Our staff prays all day long. They would not force themselves on somebody and try to force our religion on somebody or what we believe. We don’t do that.”
Mr. Graham’s critics have received their share of backlash. In an op-ed for The New York Post, Jonathan S. Tobin, the editor in chief of Jewish News Syndicate, said Mr. Johnson and other Democrats had demonstrated “ingratitude” to Samaritan’s Purse.
“Rather than welcome the group’s unselfish sacrifice, our local bigs greeted it with suspicion and hostility, thus treating the pandemic as one more culture-war battle line, rather than an opportunity to unite across the old divides,” he wrote.
Mr. Graham said he thought most New Yorkers agreed with him on marriage, an assertion not borne out by polling data, which in 2017 showed 69 percent of the state supported same-sex marriage.
“The vast majority of the people in the city believe that marriage is between a man and a woman,” he said, “but the majority would also say that if two men want to live together, that’s their business, or two women want to live together, that’s their business.”
Mr. Johnson said Mr. Graham’s record was not an issue about which reasonable people could agree to disagree.
“Civil rights and recognizing the goodness and intrinsic value of gay people and Muslim people, that’s not about a difference of opinion,” Mr. Johnson said.
But the controversy did not affect the daily routine of the field hospital. Workers there said they had been warmly welcomed by New Yorkers, who sent food and gathered to cheer for them at 7 p.m.
“We have been so well loved here, truly,” said Jill Pike, 30, a nurse who traveled with her husband, Brendan, from Medford, Ore., to work in the hospital. The couple said their faith had led them to Samaritan’s Purse.
“We work here with people who all share a common sense of purpose,” said Mr. Pike, 28, who is also a nurse. “We are all here because Jesus died for us and for our sins, so we came here to lay down a small part of our lives to help others. How could we not? Giving sacrificial love is very important to us.”
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