“When I was growing up in South Jamaica, Queens, I was learning how to box, and every time I would get in the ring, I would lose the fight. And my trainer [would] say, ‘Eric, the problem is you leave your best fight in the gym, and you’re supposed to take it into the ring with you.’

“And that is what has happened to many of us. The synagogue is the gym. The church is the gym. The Sikh temple is the gym. The mosque is the gym. You are there for training. You are not there to leave your best worship in the gym,” Adams insisted.

He pointed out that much of the challenges communities face today have to do with the removal of prayer in public schools.

“We would not have a crisis of domestic violence. … When we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools. So the reflection point of today, when we do an analysis of these annual coming-together, is to state, ‘Are we leaving our best fight in the gym? Are we finding ways to really take what we took in the gym and bring it into the real fight?'” he asked.

“We became so modernized that our new response is to act like we don’t see the despair that people are experiencing every day. We’ve become so hip, so cool, so Instagram-ish, so Facebook-ish, so Twitter-ish, that we have TikToked our way out of the humanity that we’ve always known,” the mayor added.

“And then we say to ourselves — this is what I find interesting — we say to ourselves, ‘What’s wrong with these children? What’s wrong with these kids?’ Let me tell you something about being a child. Children look for indicators that are they moving in the right direction,” he asserted.

“You ever see your baby when all of a sudden, they’re doing something wrong, and they look over and peep at you and to see what’s going on? Now, when they peep over to see if they’re doing something wrong, the parents are doing the same thing. We have abandoned the role of what it is to be a parent.”

“We need to build children, that’s better for our world. And we have to be honest about that,” Adams said.

Adam says raising the next generation up in the faith would help ‘build’ them.

“And it means instilling in them some level of faith and belief. … Don’t tell me about no separation of church and state. State is the body. Church is the heart. You take the heart out of the body, the body dies. I can’t separate my belief because I’m an elected official. When I walk, I walk with God. When I talk, I talk with God. When I put policies in place, I put them in with a God-like approach to them,” he added.

“That’s who I am. And I was that when I was that third grader, and I’m going to be that when I leave government. I am still a child of God and will always be a child of God, and I won’t apologize about being a child of God. It is not going to happen.”

Adams, a non-denominational Christian, credited God for becoming the mayor of New York City.

“I’m here because of the faith-based institution. You do not take this journey on your own. I strongly believe in all my heart, God said, ‘I’m going to take the most broken person, and I’m going to elevate him to the place of being the mayor of the most powerful city on the globe,'” he said.

Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Michael M. Santiago/Staff