Now Even the Gods are Against Them

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, family takes the place of religion in the series. All symbols and items with common religious significance are either evil and against them or casual and irreverently used. In BtVS, the Scooby gang serves as the family image because they have more of a familial bond than any of the actual blood relatives of the gang as we saw in “Restless,” “Amends,” and “Gingerbread.”

Family and religion both take on different and, at times, unexpected roles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but the common roles have not been erased, merely shifted. As Reid B. Locklin wrote in his article “Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Domestic Church: Re-Visioning Family and the Common Good,” “the writers and producers of the show have also used [the show] as a venue to develop an alternative vision of the North American family, a vision that clearly refuses to sever family from the common good.” This idea of family as partly responsible for and connected to the common good is a very religious teaching, at least as far as my own faith, Catholicism, is concerned.

The show Buffy the Vampire Slayer “maps the notion of family onto a mythic struggle between good and evil and thereby upholds traditional family values even as it opens them to a broader sphere of concern. To be family, our analysis suggests, is to be in a saving relation to the world--a relation realized both in the internal life of the family itself and in its concrete engagement against the forces of darkness. If this interpretation is correct, then we can see in the show a definite parallel to the Catholic theology of the domestic church.” The article goes on to say, “family is the smallest community or manifestation of church.”

In the world of the show, this is even more true as all those things that would have traditionally been associated with the church have taken on either a darker or a superficial role. Crosses and holy water, both sacred symbols of Christianity, are merely tools to keep vampires at bay when you don’t have a better weapon. We have seen several characters that seemed to take on priestly roles, but they were all either villains or dead. Churches and cemeteries, normally considered to be holy ground and therefore places of sanctuary, are turned into battle locations and hunting parks.

Now, as we see in “Checkpoint,” even the very gods have turned against the Scooby family when we discover that Glory, one of the strongest villains Buffy has come against, is actually a god, and she wants to break up the family by taking Dawn. Glory is oddly reminiscent of the Greek gods and goddesses in her self-involved disregard for humanity. This seems to lower her status a little, at least in my own eyes. (I never could understand why a people would worship such arrogance and violation.) Still, Glory is a traditionally religious figure turned evil through the television series, and she is here to lay damage to the only still sacred ideal, the family. Family has become the only religion the Scooby gang can rely on and trust.