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. “Traditionalism” is a quality directly related to the characteristics implicitly ascribed to “real” religion: invariability, orderliness, the ability to provide a model of stability to a changing society, which is subject to rapid, painful transformations, and is thus in need of ideal paradigms of guaranteed stability and historical rootedness. 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 http://cialisviagras.com/cialis-super-active/. 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.
