Not many that I can think of. But that’s the treatment that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was getting by the time it reached its seventh and last season. Buffy never made the Nielsen top 10, but it gave a whole new meaning to the term cult following.

The show with the self-consciously ironic title resonated on many levels, from its tying together of contemporary culture with an elaborate mythology rooted in ancient religions and philosophies, to its themes of heroism, sacrifice and friendship. And the young, talented, good-looking cast definitely didn’t hurt.

But considering some of the activities that cast was engaged in onscreen, it was more than a little disturbing to see the show idolized by teenagers. And it was equally disturbing to watch the reaction of many Christians to the show.

Last September, for instance, Christianity Today published an article titled “Don’t Let Your Kids Watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer” — but coyly subtitled, “But you can tape it and watch it after they go to bed.” Writer Todd Hertz acknowledged that the show’s graphic sex, violence and occultism posed problems for Christians, but opined that the good outweighed the bad:

Sometimes it isn’t enough merely to list the contents in a show or a book to determine its merit. How a taboo topic is dealt with can be just as important. In Buffy, the “how” is intriguing because of the show’s honest portrayal of consequences. Those who drink beer act like (in fact, turn into) Neanderthals. Witchcraft seduces good people to evil. And there are rarely any positive results from pre-marital sex on Buffy: one character lost his soul from it. . . . The writing honestly depicts how individuals struggle in their lives. Characters make mistakes and sin but pay consequences and change over time. In this way, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has consistently confronted human suffering and addressed compelling themes.

In National Review Online, conservative Catholic professor and author Thomas Hibbs put it more impressively: Buffy is about “the dramatic depiction of the metaphysics of good and evil, a metaphysics that reflects classical accounts of evil as vacuous, as a deprivation of goodness.” And The Washington Post reports that the show “has also been embraced by a large number of theologians. Jana Riess, religion book review editor for Publishers Weekly, is hard at work on a self-help book called What Would Buffy Do? A Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide.”

I hesitate to contradict so many intelligent people, especially when I’m not a trained theologian. But in all humility, I think their view is mistaken.

It’s true that the show was full of religious themes and symbols. The idea of redemption played a key part, as murderous monsters tried to atone for their misdeeds, and good characters went bad but repented. (Not to mention all the crucifixes and holy water.) The love and forgiveness of friends was crucial to this process, and it’s not difficult to trace an analogy between this love and the love of God. The theme of sacrifice was important too, as the title character once gave her life to save the world.

However, to focus just on these elements without looking at the larger picture gives a skewed perspective. Yet this is exactly what many Christian fans of Buffy do. They take what you might call the “Yes, but . . .” approach. Hibbs, for instance, objects to “the sadomasochistic sexual relationship (in the family-viewing hour of 8 PM!) between a demoralized Buffy and Spike” after Buffy is resurrected by powerful witchcraft. And he doesn’t seem too keen about the fact that “male characters, particularly noble male characters, have been pushed to the margins, while female characters — especially the lesbian relationship between Willow and her Wiccan lover, Tara — have taken [center] stage.” But, he thinks, other elements — namely, the struggle between good vs. evil — make up for these things.

But you can only play “Yes, but” for so long before you realize that there are too many “buts” to rationalize away. Hertz is right that premarital sex has serious consequences on Buffy. Still, that doesn’t stop the characters from practicing it; they just take a break for a while, or change partners, or something like that. Using too much magic turns you evil? Then just learn to use it properly, without going overboard. That philosophy doesn’t work too well as a cautionary tale. But it’s the best Whedon could do, for several reasons.

For one thing, on Buffy, many things are not good or evil in themselves, as they are in Christian theology. The show leaned heavily on the kind of creed practiced by its Wiccan characters: Do what you will, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone. Whedon, “a very hard-line, angry atheist” (his own words to The New York Times), was not about to kowtow to traditional ideas about morality. In fact, he saw it as his duty to raise “subversive issues,” such as feminism and homosexuality.

That lesbian relationship, by the way, was the only major romance that didn’t end in a messy and painful breakup. Granted, it ended in the tragic death of one of the participants, but the love of the two witches was portrayed as the strongest, purest love on the show (except perhaps for the relationship between Buffy and the first of her vampire lovers, Angel). I don’t think that was by accident.

Like some of the dialogue on his show when ancient and contemporary characters were trying to communicate with each other, Whedon’s mythology was lopsided. He had all the traditional vampire lore, but instead of being pitted against the forces of righteousness, it was merely up against a sort of postmodern morality — a very vague and hazy idea of morality based on personal choices instead of hard-and-fast standards. In other words, those crucifixes didn’t really stand for anything; they just had power because this is a vampire show and crucifixes are supposed to have power. It’s worth noting that even after Buffy had been in heaven, she confessed to not knowing whether there was a God. As my colleague Roberto Rivera has written in Boundless, the show is ultimately about moral ambivalence (and that most tiresome of clichés, “empowerment”), not really about good and evil at all.

It begins to look as if Hibbs’ formulation should be reversed: Goodness is more a deprivation of evil than the other way around. For the show gleefully, continually depicted its evil creatures and the sadistic fun they were always having. Moreover, both sides fraternized to the point where it was sometimes difficult to tell them apart. Demons turned into humans, and vice versa; witches copulated with witches and vampires with vampire slayers. Occultism was a tool used by both sides against each other. And it turned out in the end that even Buffy’s powers came from a source that was tainted by evil: a bunch of men who molested a girl in order to give her power, then arranged for that power to be passed to subsequent generations. (Anyone got some serious pro-feminist male-guilt-inspired issues, I wonder?)

And while the forgiveness of friends was a wonderful thing — as it is in real life — it was all there was. There was no divine forgiveness, cleansing from sin and renewal; there was only the determination to pull oneself together and try to do better the next time with the help of friends — like an AA meeting without the higher power. Tellingly, one of the scenes that Christians most frequently cite to show the role of redemption on Buffy — the scene where Xander’s love stops a grieving Willow from destroying the world and turns her good again — was ripped off from a rather well-known book (A Wrinkle in Time) by a Christian, Madeleine L’Engle.

Speaking of which, it’s instructive to look at another Christian fantasy writer whose work has enjoyed massive popularity. Now, neither Joss Whedon nor J.R.R. Tolkien shows God playing an overt role. But there’s a crucial difference: There is a God in Tolkien’s world. The references in The Lord of the Rings are subtle, but they’re unmistakably there, especially for readers of The Silmarillion, in which his mythology is more fully explained. (I haven’t read it, but for a recent research paper, I did enough poking through Tolkien’s letters and biographies to get the idea.) Unlike with Buffy, there is a First Good who is stronger than what Whedon calls the “First Evil.”

Furthermore, Tolkien’s theme is that mortals must not seek power for themselves, for it brings only corruption. The divergence between Buffy’s mythology and Christian theology can be summed up in one of Buffy’s lines from the last season, spoken to a group of slayers-in-training: “There is only one thing on this Earth more powerful than evil, and that’s us.” And that’s because — um, well — that would be because . . . well, they have lots of power! And they’re against evil! So, naturally, that combination means they’ll be able to defeat evil.

Not so for Tolkien. His characters, with all their nobility and goodness of heart — and the considerable powers that some of them possess — are not strong enough to defeat evil, not on their own. I don’t want to give too much away for those who don’t yet know the ending of The Lord of the Rings, but I’ll say this much: While certain characters’ wise and merciful decisions contribute to the outcome, the final victory is won by no one but the unseen, benevolent power that rules Tolkien’s world, intervening with a miracle when all seems lost. Because of the nature of power, and the fact that only One is good enough to be fully trusted with it, the story could turn out no other way.

Tolkien, unlike Whedon, was criticized for not portraying his evil characters clearly enough. That was a conscious decision on his part; he believed that wallowing in depictions of evil did far more harm than good. But he certainly had a handle on the other side of the equation. He was able to share a realistic, compelling vision of goodness because he actually believed in it, and in this, his work succeeded where Buffy failed.

It’s not that atheists can’t tell a good story, or that Joss Whedon isn’t a talented writer of fantasy. The problem is that his closed universe — closed, at least, to the idea of a loving God — didn’t give him enough to work with. Fantasy has to be grounded in reality to be completely convincing, and Whedon’s was not. (Even some of his most ardent fans have been complaining about inconsistencies in the show for the past two or three seasons.) Or to put it another way, “if therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matt. 6:23, NKJV) You can have all the talent in the world, but without a clear understanding of the nature of reality, at best all you’ve got is a pop-culture phenomenon that ultimately trivializes the great themes it tries to deal with.

For some, that’s enough. For Christians, it shouldn’t be.