First, Dracula is the family’s name. ‘A Dracula’ would be ‘someone from the family Dracula.’ What you want is ‘a vampire.’
Second, I don’t believe Dracula encounters holy symbols at all. The closest I recall is that when Lucy Westenra dies, Dr. Van Hellsing places a crucifix on her body in order to prevent her from rising as a vampire. (A maid then steals it, because it’s gold, and she rises anyway). It’s the presence of the holy symbol that prevents the unholy undead from rising.
I haven’t read it in a while, but this is the only instance I really recall a holy symbol being mentioned; the villagers in Dracula’s village also try to give Johnathan a crucifix when they find out he’s going to Dracula’s castle, but I can’t recall if he takes it, and if he does it doesn’t seem to bother any of the vampires who try to eat him.
In either case it seems to be more of a preventative measure.
I’m pretty sure the ‘holy symbols repel the evil’ comes from Nosferatu where vampires are treated as considerably more ‘Unholy’ than in Dracula and the heroes explicitly use a cross to protect themselves from and drive back Nosferatu. (Dracula vampires are evil but considerably more ‘human’ than other interpretations, they’re even capable of entering sunlight, they just lose all their supernatural powers during the day.)
And in Nosferatu it’s the belief in the thing that enables it to protect someone from the unholy creature. Nosferatu is repelled by holy symbols held aloft by people who believe in them because God is protecting them from his unholy monster. It’s a defensive act.
In a less literary context; typically Dracula is considered to be Vlad Drăculea the Third, better known as Vlad the Impaler, who was notably very christian. His country, Wallachia, was claimed by the Ottoman Empire during the time of the crusades. Vlad was raised, essentially as a prisoner of the Ottomans, and is reputed to have been a very disobedient child who refused to convert to Islam like his little brother. So when the crusades hit, and the Ottoman Empire demanded extra taxes from Wallachia to help pay for their armies, Vlad said no as loud as he possibly could, (by nailing turbans to their wearer’s heads) and when the Ottomans sent an army to try and murder him for it, he got his impaling on.
(Although it’s worth noting that some historians take the stance that Vlad’s legendary sadism was a defensive tactic as well. His country/armies were significantly smaller than the Ottoman Empire and if the Empire put significant effort into stamping him out they could’ve done so easily. So his extreme-violence was a means of making sure people didn’t want to fight him. At least one story claims that when a truly massive army was forced to walk through a ‘forest’ of Vlad’s impaled victims to get to his capital less than 10% of the army actually arrived due to the rest deserting.)
In this context it’s usually taken that Dracula’s revulsion toward holy symbols is because he’s a man who lost his faith. A crucifix is a symbol of the thing he damned himself for.
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