In this "new" age of religious squabbling, when atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have become bestselling authors, God has acquired a somewhat unlikely champion — Karen Armstrong, a former nun who eschewed religious obedience for a writer's freedom.

The author of more than 20 books, including her latest, The Case for God, Armstrong came to prominence in 1993 with her first bestseller, A History of God.

In between, she's written biographies of Buddha and Muhammad, but often she writes the same book, slightly revamped to develop her basic theme — that God is back, meaning He has not been eliminated by our Western obsession with the rational, and that He is not some kind of mind-forged beast, the creation of religious bosses who prey on the gullible (as the New Atheists would have it).

God, as Armstrong reads the idea, is something entirely different — and inescapable. You can read her manifesto in Foreign Policy magazine, of all places.

There, she tells the world's policy wonks that God is not dead as Nietzsche would have had it. Nor "reborn," pace the Economist, from the cultural clashes of our post-9/11 world.

Instead — get used to Him — He is embedded in our hearts and our politics, alive and well in the 21st century as He has been for millennia, because of the human need for meaning.

An unlikely champion

I say Armstrong is an unlikely champion of God because she spent seven years in a religious order, from her adolescence to her 20s, before leaving, disenchanted.

God's diplomat: historian and theologian Karen Armstrong, shown here during a visit to Islamabad in January 2008. (Mian Khursheed/Reuters)

According to her 1992 memoir, Through The Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Life In and Out of the Convent, training to be a nun was a totally miserable experience.

Her teachers were dogmatic and didn't like to think. The life of a nun, which she eventually became, was stultifying and tedious, hardly spiritual.

At the time, she was also suffering from an undiagnosed illness (epilepsy) and was infirm for years, which she recounts in her other memoir, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out Of Darkness.

Her climb led her to become a broadcaster and teacher, as well as a bestselling author.

But that would not be her final transformation.

Calling herself a "freelance monotheist," she has recovered the sense of the divine through her studies (study as prayer is a very Jewish idea, she tells us).

She has also absorbed Buddhist ideas about God as the void, Jewish ideas of the Lord as "totally other" and Christian ideas about turning one's cheek and giving up one's ego.

What's more, since Sept. 11, 2001, the British-born Armstrong has become an appreciative, even fervent defender of Islam (though she ritually denounces extremism and terror whatever its impetus).

Islam's defender

In fact, because of her defence of Islam, the Egyptian government gave her a medal for services to the religion, one of the stages of her transformation into a freelance diplomat.

Armstrong is a now an ambassador for the UN Alliance of Civilizations, speaks all over the world and is currently working on a project called A Charter for Compassion. It tries to bring the Golden Rule (do unto others …) into our public and private lives.

She's a wonderful stump speaker and a natural guest for public radio and television where she's allowed more time for her set pieces.

I started booking her on CBC Radio's Tapestry years ago when I was the producer there and she's returned several times with a new book in hand. Just a few weeks ago, in fact, she spoke with Tapestry host Mary Hynes.

Like every diplomat, Armstrong pretty much gives the same message everywhere, like a politician on the campaign trail.

She likes to take on the New Atheists, especially the "unholy trinity" of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, for their technique of "presenting religion at its absolute worst."

But attacking the New Atheists isn't really her main preoccupation. Indeed, she began her campaign for God well before these writers achieved bestseller fame when she published what I think is still her best book, A History of God in 1993.

2 dominant ideas

In a nutshell, Armstrong has two broad ideas she likes to drive home.

First, religion should be about compassion. That's the litmus test. She likes to tell the story about the famous Rabbi Hillel who, when asked to summarize his faith, said: "Do unto others. The rest is commentary."

Her second important point is that we misunderstand religious faith. It isn't a set of dogmas. It's an active practice — learning to feel with real compassion, not pity. Feel with is the active commandment here, a habit that takes years to cultivate.

Religious "truth" is different too, Armstrong argues.

It should be seen as an open, intuitive, poetic narrative, a "mythos" that reaches into the realms of unknown possibility.

Sorry, Prof. Dawkins, but it is not something that requires the same rules of evidence as science or reason.

More truth

Where Armstrong gets into trouble with many of her critics is in her attempts to soft-peddle the issue of Islamic extremism.

She likes to argue, as do many others, that Islam is not a violent religion and she objects to critics like Robert Spencer, the director of an organization called Jihad Watch, who make this equation.

At times, though, Armstrong more than soft-peddles. In her interview with Mary Hynes, she said: "If your aim is to make things better, don't attack [fundamentalists].

"Leave them alone or they'll become more virulent. Every fundamentalist movement is based on fear. When you attack them it feeds this fear that they are to be annihilated."

With this, she may be turning the Christian cheek. But to many it can sound like appeasement. I suspect that, if pressed, Armstrong might back-peddle on this assessment.

Still, critics of her work argue that she repeatedly skewers history.

She says, for example, that Islamic radicalism is a relatively new phenomenon, a response to modernity and Western encroachment. This might baffle other readers of this history, who understand Islamic extremism has a long and virulent past.

It is a tough time for God these days, what with all the celebrity atheists about, not to mention all those crazed bombers.

It can also be a delicate time for a writer eager to promote religious harmony, worthy though that project is.

Too bad Armstrong sees the need to occasionally sweep the sins of some of God's more fanatical henchmen under the carpet of history. We can stand more steely truth from God's diplomat.