Civilisation

I used to think that Halloween was evil. I heard stories of sacrifices and saw scary non-Christians traipse around town attempting to frighten people and took those sorts of things to be confirmations of my suspicions. In fact, I've had that conviction until very recently. However, I read an article by James B. Jordan that seriously challenged this view and, more than that, painfully pointed out that my conclusions weren't as well-grounded as I'd thought.

Now, I hate to have misled you, but I don't think that I want to discuss the Christian versus pagan ownership of Halloween as much as I want to discuss whether it even matters. Say there's a celebration, and no one really remembers where it came from - some traditions point to Christian sources, others pagan. Now certainly one could spend hours researching and debating to find a conclusion and, though I believe that has its merits and is very often the best course of action, let's assume that it's "neutral", that the argument could go either way. What do Christians do? It seems to be Christian (as it celebrates some sort of event or facet of Christianity), but it also seems pagan (as most of the world seems to celebrate it having no regard of its spiritual significance).

Hopefully, you grimaced when you saw "neutral". We know from Genesis that nothing in this universe is neutral, that God has commanded us to go and fill and subdue the whole earth, to turn a jungle into a garden. In short, we are called to civilize this world and to reclaim it as God's. Since we also know that God's truth is not relevant only to matters of the church or the family, but to the entire universe and all it contains, it seems to make sense that as Christians it is also our glorious calling to go out into the world and subdue all things to Christ: politics, the arts, family, nutrition, academia, etc. So to conclude that something is "neutral" in this world doesn't make sense to me: it is either Christ's or it is Satan's, and eventually all things will be Christ's.

Now here's the point that I reach and don't quite understand what the Bible tells me to do. The Old Testament is very clear in instructing the Israelites to touch no unclean thing, to be separate from the world; that when they come upon a pagan "high place" and conquer it, they don't use it and build on top of it - they destroy it. That is part of conquering Satan's kingdom and replacing it with God's. But how does that apply now? We know that nothing is unclean inherently, but since the world has taken hold of such things as Halloween, drinking, Christmas, dancing, smoking, etc., does that mean that Christians reject them outright? Or do we point out that the world has claimed ownership over something that isn't theirs, and proceed to reclaim it for Christ? I suppose I'm asking how to know when to reject the world and when to redeem it (if any such dichotomy exists).