Two secular New Yorkers visited the Samaritan’s Purse field hospital: One volunteered, the other was arrested
Whitney Tilson, left, and Rev. Billy Talen, in pink, at the site of the field hospital in Central Park in early April. Courtesy photos.
NEW YORK — Within a week after the evangelical organization opened its emergency field hospital — usually deployed to war-torn cities like Mosul, Iraq — in Manhattan’s Central Park, it had attracted two locals who each made their own splash.
Whitney Tilson, a retired hedge fund manager who publishes an investment newsletter, was walking his dog with his wife, Susan, in late March when they noticed tents being set up on the park’s East Meadow across the street from their Upper East Side apartment building. A friend told Tilson about the Christian relief organization behind the effort and encouraged him to get involved.
Tilson did just that, spending the next eight days there helping to prepare the site for its operations. The 68-bed pop-up facility started taking overflow COVID-19 patients from Mount Sinai Hospital four days after the build started. Tilson made regular trips to Costco for food and drinks, spending about $2,000 each trip.
“I buy these bottles of Starbucks frappuccino, you know, Diet Coke, regular Coke, Pepsi — things with caffeine so when they’re working the night shift and they’re tired, caring for patients, I want them to come in and have a pick-me-up,” Tilson said.
On April 5, Billy Talen hopped a police barricade and walked across the East Meadow in a pink suit and clerical collar. He planted a small rainbow flag near the perimeter of the field hospital, shouting, “Get out of New York. We don’t want your racism here.”
He was promptly forced to the ground by two NYPD officers and arrested.
Talen, 69, is a performance artist who goes by Reverend Billy. He performs with a nonprofit theater group called the Stop Shopping Choir, which blends theater and activism on a wide array of social issues. “We resist extinction, but bring humor and music to the end of the world,” the group’s website proclaims. “And, we do get arrested a lot.”
The group’s director and Talen’s partner, Savitri D, planned the protest and filmed it. After Talen was released from custody, they spoke to Religion Unplugged from their Brooklyn home. They said they considered the action necessary despite heavy criticism, including from their ideological allies.
“We think it’s a fundraiser. We think it’s a publicity stunt,” said Talen. He pointed to the Easter service broadcast from the site by Franklin Graham, head of Samaritan’s Purse, and challenged the idea that 68 beds were needed.
New York City has had more than 160,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 12,000 deaths attributed to the disease. Savitri said the city has many indoor options for additional treatment spaces that aren’t burdened with the needs of a field hospital, like flood mitigation and engineered access to clean water and electricity. To her, the effort looks designed to benefit Samaritan’s Purse beyond the reward of treating severely ill patients. She and Talen criticized the organization for going into difficult situations with needed healthcare but ulterior motives.
“That’s the bottom line,” she said. “Is the priority healthcare?”
The criticism isn’t new for Samaritan’s Purse. The group has faced plenty of scrutiny over its proselytizing. As far back as the Gulf War, it was reprimanded for plans to supply American troops in Saudi Arabia with Arabic-language Bibles to give out, which would have violated the agreement between the U.S. and its strictly Islamic ally.
Graham’s statements about Islam and homosexuality have been criticized as bigoted by the political and religious left. That isn’t lost on Tilson, who said he has had some tough conversations with people in his life who have strong feelings about the issues. It’s a concern of his as well, he said, because he has many loved ones in the LGBTQ community.
Still, his city is in crisis and help is help, he said.
Kristen Dirks, the doctor in charge of the field hospital’s intensive care unit, said that is what the staff is there for. “We are first and foremost healthcare workers,” she said. “We love that Jesus is a part of our work. We love that we can openly share that with patients, but that’s not something that we are forcing onto anyone.”
He is moved by the commitment and professionalism he sees in the doctors and nurses he has gotten to know. He values the relationships he’s forming with them and other volunteers who are keeping the hospital going. Most hail from parts of the country and political spectrum that are a world away from his own, but he’s finding much more common ground than differences of opinion, he said.
“The whole coronavirus thing has turned political,” Tilson said. “There’s going to be a bitter, bitter, bitter presidential election season that we’re already in the middle of, followed by an election in which I am not sure the losing side will accept the results if it’s at all close.”
Despite all of that, he’s more optimistic now that he has felt camaraderie with the field hospital staff. Religion has never been a part of his life, yet that doesn’t define the relationships he’s forming with people whose lives are centered around it. He’s making lifelong friends, he said.
Savitri and Talen each said they experienced fundamentalist religion early in their lives. Savitri’s father converted from Catholicism to a strict form of Islam and moved with her to the Middle East for a time. Talen was raised Dutch Calvinist in the Midwest.
“A lot of us are P.K.’s — preacher’s kids,” Savitri said of their local social and activism network. “A lot of us are queer and come from backgrounds where we were closeted or pushed out of our families because of it. And, of course, more broadly that’s the story of New York City.”
To them, the city represents escape from traditions and relationships that abuse and traumatize. Savitri said she is a friend and counselor to many people who have struggled with being cast out by their parents for their sexual orientation.
A particular point of controversy has been Samaritan’s Purse’s requirement that its paid staff sign a statement of faith that includes language about marriage being between a man and a woman. Tilson said that he wasn’t asked to sign anything before volunteering and refuted rumors that speculated about it.
Franklin Graham issued a statement on April 14 that addressed concerns about and opposition to his organization’s presence in Central Park. Some of the critics he identified were eight Democratic members of Congress from New York, the New York City Commission on Human Rights and the Reclaim Pride Coalition, a group of LGBTQ advocacy organizations.
His statement described Samaritan’s Purse as a “decidedly Christian private relief organization” funded by private donors from around the world.
“In a country that cherishes freedom of speech and religion we don’t object to opposition or criticism of our beliefs as a Christian organization,” the statement said. “What we do object to is being harassed into diverting precious resources of time and energy and personnel away from serving COVID-19 patients in New York City in order to respond to demands for documents and other information from eight Democratic members of Congress, the Human Rights Commission and the Reclaim Pride Coalition — all while the death toll in New York continues to climb.”
Micah Danney is a Poynter-Koch fellow and a reporter and associate editor for Religion Unplugged. He is an alumnus of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and has reported for news outlets in the NYC area, interned at The Times of Israel and covered religion in Israel for The GroundTruth Project.