> if you were to read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with everything a puritan found objectionable torn out of it, there wouldn't be a very sensible story left.
I think you misunderstand what religious people really want. Most people with "puritanical" objections to media content are just wanting it to be less explicit (i.e. left to the imagination) - not completely whitewashed from the story. After all, most religious texts themselves are rife with sex and murder; the acts themselves are usually not explicitly described in great detail, however.
"Lysanderoth's sword tore into Archibald's neck, spraying blood and chunks of windpipe across the battlefield and leaving him loudly gurgling as he slumped to the ground"
vs.
"Lysanderoth slew Archibald with the sword"
You can easily retain the story while eliminating the explicit aspect of the prose.
For example, I edited the entirety of the "A Song of Fire and Ice" series, and you may be interested to learn that eliminating every instance of explicit violence, sex, and profanity altered slightly less than 1% of the total word count of each book.