Dr. David Aikman is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist, a best-selling author, and a foreign policy consultant based in the Washington, D.C.-area. His wide-ranging professional achievements include a 23-year career at TIME Magazine with reporting spanning the globe of nearly all the major historical events of the time.  Since leaving TIME, he has authored a half-dozen books, including the new analytical biography of the great evangelist Billy Graham (BILLY GRAHAM:  HIS LIFE AND INFLUENCE, Thomas Nelson, 2006), and the ground-breaking JESUS IN BEIJING:  HOW CHRISTIANITY IS TRANSFORMING CHINA AND CHANGING THE WORLD BALANCE OF POWER (Regnery, 2003).  A revised and updated paperback edition was released in October 2006.

With special expertise in China, Russia, the Middle East, Mongolia and religious freedom issues worldwide, Dr. Aikman is frequently invited to deliver expert testimony at Congressional hearings and is a popular speaker at conferences, seminars, panels and to academic, church and professional groups at events all over the world.  

Dr. Aikman’s broadcast career includes a 1999 two-hour documentary on the Middle East peace process, Vanishing Peace: The Aftermath of Oslo, that was aired worldwide on the BBC, and a six-part documentary based on his book GREAT SOULS: SIX WHO CHANGED THE CENTURY, an examination of the lives of six morally exemplary figures of the 20th century:  Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Billy Graham, Nelson Mandela, and Elie Wiesel.  

In addition, Dr. Aikman has been a commentator on NBC, ABC, CNN, Fox News and the BBC and has also been a guest on shows on C-Span, CBN and local television and radio stations around the country. Dr. Aikman is on the editorial board of the Salem Communications, one of the nation’s largest radio networks, and his editorials air regularly on Christian radio stations around the United States.  He has also appeared regularly since 1986 on the Voice of America weekly news show “Issues in the News” and often is the host of the program.

Dr. Aikman writes a regular column on international affairs for Christianity Today called “Global Prognosis,” and is a regular contributor to such publications as The American Spectator and The Weekly Standard.

He is an associate professor of history at Patrick Henry University in Virginia, where he also coaches young writers. His teaching career includes two decades of teaching international relations at the University of the Nations in Hawaii. Dr. Aikman also serves as a Senior Fellow for The Trinity Forum, a leadership academy that seeks to transform society by helping leaders examine issues in their personal and public lives in the context of faith.

In 1998, Dr. Aikman founded Gegrapha (www.gegrapha.org), a worldwide fellowship group for Christians in journalism. He is now its founding chairman and a board member.

Dr. Aikman speaks six languages, including French, German, Russian and Chinese.

A graduate of Oxford University’s Worcester College, Dr. Aikman holds a PhD from the University of Washington in Russian and Chinese history.  He began his reporting career with TIME magazine in 1971.  In the 23 years that followed, Dr. Aikman reported from five continents and more than 55 countries, and wrote three consecutive Man of the Year cover stories.  As a TIME magazine Senior Correspondent and foreign correspondent, he interviewed numerous major world figures, from Mother Teresa to Manuel Noriega, from Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Pham Van Dong, from Boris Yeltsin to Billy Graham.  Dr. Aikman was assigned to bureaus in Hong Kong, from where he covered the entire Asian region; in Beijing, China; in Berlin, Germany, where he covered all of Eastern Europe; and in Jerusalem, Israel, where he covered the entire Middle East.  He was bureau chief in Berlin, Jerusalem and Beijing before returning to the United States to cover the State Department until his departure in 1994 to devote time to his book-writing.

Dr. Aikman was a Senior Fellow at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center from 1998 to 2002. During that time, he also served as editor-at-large of Newsroom, an Internet-based news organization reporting on the religious aspect of news events around the world.

Dr. Aikman has written extensively on religious persecution based on first-hand, news-breaking reporting in countries including Russia, China, Egypt, and Pakistan.  His expertise in religious freedom in Asia and the Middle East goes back 25 years, with first-hand reports for Foreign Affairs, The American Spectator, The Weekly Standard, Citizen Magazine as well as several issues of TIME.  His September 1997 cover story "The Laogai Archipelago" in The Weekly Standard was the most detailed journalistic account to date of China's prison and labor camp system. 

In April and August 1998 and in September 1999, Dr. Aikman visited Russia and China, respectively, to investigate the status of religious freedom in both those countries.  He returned to China for three months in the summer of 2002 and traveled extensively throughout the country, interviewing Chinese Christians from all walks of life and backgrounds for JESUS IN BEIJING:  HOW CHRISTIANITY IS TRANSFORMING CHINA AND CHANGING THE WORLD BALANCE OF POWER, the most comprehensive and up-to-date book-length account of the situation of Christianity in China today and the historical influences on its development.  

Dr. Aikman is the author of nine published books on a wide range of topics, and the editor or co-author of four others. His 2004 biography, A MAN OF FAITH:  THE SPIRITUAL JOURNEY OF GEORGE W. BUSH (W Group), was a bestseller and was translated into Chinese and published – entirely uncensored – in China. The presidential biography has also been released in Norwegian. JESUS IN BEIJING has been translated into several languages, including Korean and Swedish, and been published worldwide. It is considered a must-read for anyone interested in the church in China.

A book on the dangers of atheism, THE DELUSION OF DISBELIEF: WHY THE NEW ATHEISM IS A THREAT TO YOUR LIFE LIBERTY AND PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS (Tyndale) is due for release in April 2008, and he is working on a sequel to the novel QI and a primer on the Middle East.

Dr. Aikman’s extensive radio experience and television experience, in addition to the aforementioned regular appearances on VOA and Salem, include multiple guest appearances on C-Span and CNN, as well as on NBC's "Today Show," on ABC’s “Nightline,” and on local television and radio stations around the country, in connection with breaking world events, especially in the Middle East or in Asia, religious persecution around the world, and his books.  

Dr. Aikman’s wide-ranging speaking engagements have included multiple appearances at Harvard University, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, and other colleges and universities across the country; to the Council on Foreign Relations, the RAND Corporation and other think tanks; and to church groups and religious conferences, especially those focused on China, Israel or the media. He was a featured speaker at the annual board meeting of the National Religious Broadcasters in 2004, a plenary speaker (along with rock star Bono) at the Senate Republican Conference annual retreat in 2002, and has been a frequent witness at Congressional hearings on China and on Christian persecution, including the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, the House International Sub-Committee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations, and, most recently, Religious Freedom Day on the Hill in June 2006. He is also a regular moderator for seminars hosted by The Trinity Forum. (To book Dr. Aikman, click here.)