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My father, having moved down to the south-west to live near my sister, regularly takes his youngest grandson to clamber over historic military aircraft at the Fleet Air Arm Museum an hour south of his new home.

There is no squeamishness in his generation, despite his profession of Christian faith, about warfare. Indeed my own childhood was also filled with visits to military museums and airshows. Along with my two older brothers, we would spend many an hour climbing over old tanks and planes, not to mention playing war games with friends.

Birthday parties would often be held at the Army Transport Museum ten miles north of our childhood home. Once, after my brothers built a replica Phantom cockpit out of cardboard, we were invited for a day trip to an RAF airbase for a ride in their flight simulator.

In our family album, we have a photo from that day of my dad’s car parked under the delta wings of a Vulcan bomber, with three boys and three adults marvelling at the huge aircraft above us. I must have been six or seven at the time, and much too young to understand that this was Britain’s strategic nuclear deterrent until 1984, carrying a payload of tactical nuclear warheads.

It’s funny that in my adult life I have adopted a near-pacifist stance towards warfare, most likely founded on my simplistic and literalist interpretation of the gospels I was raised on, for my upbringing was filled with military paraphernalia. Bookshelves at home replete with military history. Heroic Second World War movies on the telly. Reproduction military posters on bedroom walls.

My brother had in his possession for a time a disarmed grenade, which he’d toss around his bedroom. My grandfather had a table lamp made out of an old mortar. For one of my childhood birthdays, I was gifted a plastic Uzi submachine gun. For others, model tanks and planes, masses of Action Force figures and vehicles, not to mention the obligatory SAS survival guide.

We could say that all of this was a bit confusing for a timid child who in Sunday school heard the Sermon on the Mount and learned that a good Christian is one who turns the other cheek, rather than fighting back. No, but the reality is that military patriotism is intimately linked to Christian identities, both ancient and modern.

Despite that ever-present propaganda deployed against our enemies, which intends to render their resistance to invasion, occupation and tyranny the product of a faulty faith and mindset, most Christians are not pacifists. Indeed, far from the idealism of the Quakers, most of Christian history has been anything but peaceful.

The same, of course, can be said of every faith and ideology, and of all of humanity. In the age of empires and ever since, simmering conflict has been the natural order. All of history speaks of conquest. If all vanquished people did turn the other cheek, rather than resist, then tyranny and oppression would definitely reign.

And were it not that God checks the people, some by means of others, there would have been demolished monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques in which the name of God is much mentioned.

Quran 22:40

Though we may detest it, there are indeed times when people must stand up and go out to war. That was the reality for my grandparent’s generation, who had no choice but to join the army and serve their nation. Though my parents were born after the end of the Second World War, both the trauma of that war and the spectre of the Cold War loomed large over their childhood consciousness.

Most people understand this well, for the right to self-defence is well established in international law. As in Islamic law, permission to fight is granted to those who are being fought, attacked, invaded, tyrannised or oppressed. Unfortunately, misdirected by indoctrination, sometimes we get confused between aggressors and victims.

Yes, war is sometimes a necessity, but we shouldn’t glorify it. In Afghanistan, there worked for years a great Japanese doctor affectionately known as Kaka Murad, or Uncle Nakamura. During his lifetime, he built and restored nine irrigation canals and eleven dams, supporting the agriculture and livelihood of six-hundred-thousand people. When asked about his work, he once said:

Weapons and tanks do not solve problems. The revival of farming is the cornerstone of Afghanistan’s recovery.

Dr Tetsu Nakamura

He was right. Given a choice, I’d prefer my children to clamber over tractors and combine harvesters, than grow accustomed to fighter jets and artillery guns. Peace is the optimal state for any society. War should always be a last resort. Fight those who fight you, yes, but do not transgress the limits, and if the aggressor inclines to peace, likewise incline to peace. That is from our Book and that is our way.