Emily Dickinson’s Battle With Religion Oakland University's Jane Donahue Eberwein, along with many other scholars that have studied Emily Dickinson, have claimed that Dickinson was an agnostic. They have even called her an atheist. (Eberwein, 67) Though there is evidence for their claim, there is also proof for another claim: Emily Dickinson did not rebuke religion, but was only doubting her faith. Dickinson's struggle with God reflects the major events that took place during her life. These events include the The Great Awakening, The Civil War, and Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in 1859. She might have shunned religious doctrine, but she did not shun religion as a whole. Emily Dickinson was born to parents that had just lived through the Second Great Awakening (1790-1830's) and was twenty years old when the Third Great Awakening (1850-1900) made it’s way through America. “Great Awakening” is a term used to …show more content…
Emily was 31 years old when The Civil War started. These four years were also when she was most active as a poet, writing 850 poems in these four years alone. Higginson, her literary critic and friend, went off to war as a colonel commanding an all-black regiment from South Carolina in November of 1862. On March 1862, a close friend of the Dickinson family, Frazar Stearns, was killed during the Battle of New Bern in North Carolina. This was a traumatic event in Dickinson's life. She probably questioned how an all loving God can allow people to brutally die in combat. Shortly after his death, she wrote a poem called “It feels a shame to be Alive --” where she commemorates and remembers those brave men that have died in war. (Dickinson, 1863). Certainly the Civil War brought suffering into Dickinson's life which then caused her to question human suffering and how God allows it to