If you’ve watched the TV series ‘Game of Thrones’, you’ll have heard a very famous quote: “There is a war coming, Ned. I don't know when, I don't know who we'll be fighting, but it's coming.”

Increasingly, it feels like the people of Britain are being prepared for something up ahead on the road of history.

That’s not any kind of conspiracy theory – it’s a reflection of society’s increasing militarism.

Recently, at the dawn of 2024, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, broadcast his New Year’s message from an RAF base.

For various reasons, his message broadcast on BBC One on New Year's Day featured several images of soldiers, and the machinery of war.

Ironically, amidst weapons of mass destruction, he prayed for peace.

What next in this surreal world? Perhaps a broadcast about chastity delivered live from a nightclub? Or Amsterdam’s Red Light district?

Once upon a time, if my memory serves me right, the Christian message was one of peace and love, not tacit support for militarism.

Can we really imagine Jesus Christ on a warplane, invoking one nation’s patriotism?

Surely it’s blasphemy to put the love of one country before the love of a God who allegedly loves all human beings equally?

If the Russian Orthodox Church did this, then the BBC might call it propaganda.

Justin Welby equated love of country with love of God. (Love of Britain, actually.)

I can’t remember the bit in the Bible that says ‘God so loved the world he sent his only son, but he loved Britain most of all’.

Patriotism is usually harmless unless it’s used as an excuse for violence, as it so often is.

That’s why such talk is best left to politicians, not people who are professors of peace, love and understanding.

But then is Christianity about any of those values? Or have those things become ideals long since lost in the mists of time?

Maybe these were the values of the first Christians, before the religion went mainstream.

It’s a matter of historical fact that both the Anglican and Catholic Churches were involved in Colonisation, particularly in Africa. (And Muslims, too.)

Throughout history, swords and guns have played as much of a part in religious conversions as holy books and Bibles.

And yet, on an everyday basis, religion brings good to the world. Gatherings in The Graan, or Sunday Schools in Methodist Churches, are as far removed from the rubble of war as Libya is from Lisnaskea.

Added to that, just a few days ago at Christmas, we have again seen lovely stories of the Black Santa sit-ins to raise money for charity.

Such initiatives paint a warmer portrait of Christianity than messages out of war planes.

Those good acts should be the core message of Christianity. But often, those in power lose the run of themselves.

For some reason they forget what they’re actually supposed to be representing and espousing.

Though there’s no comparison between bombs and belts, we did see the same happening in the Catholic education system in the past. Unlike today (hopefully), religious schools were not safe spaces.

Many people born before the 1980s in Ireland will have demons in their memories of their schooldays. These are demons not unlike the Gene Hackman character in Clint Eastwood’s ‘Unforgiven’.

That story features an arrogant sheriff with a whip who sees himself as being above the law.

In a similar way, some of Ireland’s teachers and priests stormed down corridors like Ayatollahs with a fetish for the strap.

Of course, what such men were doing wasn’t illegal, if it wasn’t sexual. However, on another level, it was immoral.

Anyone who preached Christianity to children ought to have been above acts of violence. Unfortunately, they weren’t.

Drunk on power and egomania, many such people lost the run of themselves. They forgot what Christianity was supposed to be about, if ever anything more than a fairytale.

Thankfully, Catholic Ireland’s education system has moved on.

Maybe eventually, Britain will do the same, as regards its approach to militarism.

Because just as there are good values at the heart of Christianity, there could also be good values at the heart of military service.

Armies that are designed to sustain peace and not fight wars would be a better force for good than what we have at the minute.

Right now, war is a lucrative business, driven by the high-tech weapons industry.

To my mind, by normalising the existence of such weapons, Archbishop Justin Welby allowed himself to be the respectable face of that.

He’d have been far better sitting out in the streets in a Black Santa costume.

If Christianity is to live up to its ideals, then it really needs to re-examine its ambiguity to violence.

Because when it lives up to those ideals, it does bring people a great deal of peace, comfort and hope.

There are a lot of good Christians in the world, and some excellent priests who did – and still do – live up to the ideals of their vocations.

They do serve Christ in the way that a person with a gun cannot.

Recently, for example, I was reading about the Fermanagh priest, Cathal Gallagher, a Columban missionary to Peru, who died last autumn.

From what I’ve read, this priest’s life story was very definitely one of championing Christian values and fighting abuses of authority.

Maybe unlike Archbishop Welby or frustrated men storming corridors, this priest never forgot the simple values of Christianity.

And at the heart of such values, we were told, is the ability to see the world like a child.

Not to beat children or abuse them, or to give tacit sympathy to creating the kinds of weapons that bomb, kill, burn, cripple or radicalise children. They’re very different things – bombs and beatings – but ...

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, each man seems to kill the thing he loves, and all these unchristian acts help to kill people’s faith, hope and love.

Hopefully though, today’s generation will see a better world emerge.

At the end of the day, I think that most people need some kind of faith.

Paul Breen is @CharltonMen on Twitter/X.