An especially important concept with which religion has been linked in the public consciousness, and on which it directly depends, remains the concept of tradition.
The central focus of this article is the information policy of the structures of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania. Petersburg, Russia. This 'inculturation' policy seeks to create an image of the Ossetian people as the natural vessel of an ancient Orthodox culture, inherited from their ancestors, the Alans, who accepted Christianity in the tenth century.
This kind of "ethnicization of Orthodoxy" — that is, the effort to overcome the ironclad associative link between the concepts of "Russianness" and "Orthodoxy" in order to present the latter as the "native faith" of non-Russian ethnic groups — represents a marked tendency in some Russian Orthodox eparchies' religious policy.
Keywords: North Ossetia, inculturation, internal mission, traditionalism, native religion, the Vladikavkaz and Alania Eparchy of the Russian Orthodox Church. Igor Kusov "Osetiny dolzhny pochuvstvovat'" And is there a place in the Orthodox soul for the customs of hoary antiquity? Religion is proving capable of winning people's minds and hearts, and, what is more, often does so through an alliance with its former opponents. But the semantic content of the concept of religion in the public consciousness has changed in these new circumstances.
Under these conditions religious ideas and practices do not simply recover lost ground but change their forms and functions. In the course of the "construction of social reality," religion, acting in concert with other "powerful" concepts of the social imaginary — the nation, the people, spirituality, faith, science, and knowledge — enters into an interdependent relationship with them.
