This article analyzes problems of preservation and reproduction of religious tradition in modern society using the example of Russian Orthodoxy. The author uses the apparatus of the phenomenological philosophy of A. Schutz to analyze the translation of «high» forms of tradition. P. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is used to describe the mechanism of the transmission of tradition in its «popular» manifestation. In the first case, the transfer of the semantic content of the tradition is realized under the conditions of the We-relationship in the immediate environment, where people are able to understand each other in the best possible way. In the second case, the concept of habitus allows us to describe how the tradition that has been developing for a long time within the community of believers remains at the level of practice, often not reaching the level of discourse and consciousness. Thus, a community of believers has various options for understanding and preserving the tradition: from attempts to penetrate the sense of the cultural heritage left by predecessors and to follow it today, to the preservation of the external manifestations of faith and the practices it presupposes in unchanged form. Therefore, religious tradition now appears in a variety of forms.