The role of helping discourse in the ‘conflict over family’ in Slovakia

This article examines meaning making among actors engaged in the ‘conflict over family’ in Slovakia. The conflict between progressive supporters of gay rights and neo-conservative advocates of the ‘traditional family’ reflects the transnational backlash against the LGBTQ+ rights recognition. Utilising a combination of pragmatic and cultural sociology, I explore how civically engaged actors from both sides make sense of their civic engagement. The analysis of qualitative interviews shows that, despite striving for different goals, all participants make sense of their work as helping. Helping discourse plays a crucial role in everyday meaning making, because it enables actors to justify their engaged work with respect to the common good in concrete terms, and it also contributes to the formation of personal attachments to the work. Civically engaged actors articulate helping discourse in narrative accounts, which elicit feelings of moral duty, satisfaction, and empowerment, thus helping them persevere in their engagement.

European policy on the recognition of LGBTQ+ rights and gender equality has suffered a neo-conservative backlash across European countries. The reactionary movement unites various actors with the aim to stop the progressive emancipation of gay people and to combat so-called the ‘gender ideology’ that they believe poses a threat to ‘traditional families’ and the survival of humanity by negating sexual differences (Korolczuk, 2016; Paternotte & Kuhar, 2017). The backlash has escalated in several post-communist EU member states in which progressive EU policies clash with concerns about fading ‘traditional values’ (Anić, 2015), resulting in national referenda proposing the prohibition of same-sex unions, marriages, adoptions, and sex education in schools. Driven by Catholic-conservative movements, referenda have taken place in Croatia (2013), Slovenia (2015), Slovakia (2015), and Romania (2018).

In this article, I focus on the case of Slovakia, where the 2015 ‘Referendum on Family’ was the crystallization point for a neo-conservative political front (Gajdoš & Rapošová, 2018). The referendum, heralded as ‘protection of the family’ and ‘children’s right to a mother and a father’, was boycotted as voting against human rights by progressive human rights civic associations. Although the referendum result was invalid due to the low voter turnout, it created the possibility to articulate positions and set a tone and stage for the ongoing ‘conflict over family’. Although social-scientific research on conflicts over gay rights and gender equality has been growing, especially in the last decade (see e.g. Aghdgomelashvili et al., 2014; Ayoub & Chetaille, 2017; Fillieule & Broqua, 2020), we still know little about the life-worlds of individuals actively engaged in the civic associations that actuate such controversies. Focusing on the case of Slovakia, I explore how representatives of conflicting civic groups find their work meaningful and fulfilling on an everyday basis, outside of moments of collective effervescence. In my view, the focus on the subject is particularly important because the civic associations performing the ‘conflict over family’ on both sides of the political spectrum have been led by a few active individuals persistent in their everyday endeavours.

To shed more light on this micro level of the ‘conflict over family’, I draw upon the strong programme in cultural sociology (Alexander & Smith, 2003) and French pragmatic sociology, also known as the sociology of critical capacity (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999, 2006), putting them into mutual dialogue. I find these theories particularly fitting to examine the meaning-making processes of the engaged actors, since both point out the need and the capacity of people to imbue their everyday lives with meaning or ‘to produce a story which makes sense’, especially when justification for action is required (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999, p. 360). Following the observations of Silber (2011, 2016) about the complementarity of cultural and pragmatic perspectives in sociology, I argue that these approaches can benefit from each other and help to develop a more nuanced understanding of meaning making and justification among people engaged in a civic issue. While pragmatic sociology guarantees a layered approach to the plurality of cultural logics through the concepts of ‘regimes of justification’ (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006) and ‘regimes of engagement’ (Thévenot, 2014), cultural sociology provides sensitivity towards the moral and emotional dimensions of meaning making among civically engaged social actors (Jasper, 2009; Ullrich, Daphi, & Baumgarten, 2014).

Analyzing the data from twenty qualitative semi-structured interviews with present or former members of civic associations engaged in the ‘conflict over family’ – civically engaged individuals¹ – I explore the following research question: How do the actors in the ‘conflict over family’ in Slovakia make sense of their civic engagement? I elaborate this question further in two directions: First, how do the engaged actors justify their work? Second, how do they recount their personal attachment to their work? Whereas the former question asks about the outward justification of the engaged work in respect to the common good, the latter addresses the inward personal attachment to their everyday working activities. I believe that the analytical differentiation of these two dimensions can shed light on the complexities of the individual and persistent civic engagement that drives the ‘conflict over family’.

I argue that, although the actors in the ‘conflict over family’ espouse different goals embedded in either conservative or progressive political worldviews, the same discursive and moral repertoire of helping pervades their meaning making on the micro level of everyday activities. I present this argument in the two analytical sections. First, I use thick description to show how the category of help permeates the meaning making of all working activities and provides an abstract ideal of the common good and civic solidarity, manifesting in a concrete form with a strong moral charge. Second, I elaborate the structure and meanings of the helping discourse. I find that civically engaged individuals also form personalised attachments to their work through the narrative of helping, because it has the capacity to create moral commitment, and arouse moral satisfaction and feelings of empowerment. Thus, understanding their civically engaged work as ‘helping’ also provides individuals with a meaningful self-image of helpers. In short, I argue that helping discourse plays a crucial role in sustaining the individual endeavours to both combat and defend LGBTQ+ rights in Slovakia.

The topic of LGBTQ+ rights officially entered the public sphere in Slovakia after the fall of communism in 1989, when a democratic civil society started to develop. In 1990, the first LGBT organisation Ganymedes was established to draw attention to gay rights. However, LGBTQ+ rights remained a marginal issue for the Slovak public and political spheres for almost twenty years. The lobby of non-governmental organisations for the establishment of civil unions failed repeatedly after Slovakia entered the EU in 2004. In was only in the early 2010s that this topic was at least formally recognised through adoption of EU anti-discrimination policies. Together with the organisation of the first official Rainbow Pride in 2010, a reactionary conservative movement was formed. The Association for the Protection of the Family (Združenie pre ochranu rodiny) organised religiously framed public protests to voice concerns about moral decay through the propagation of homosexuality, calling themselves ‘guardians of the family’. However, these Christian-conservative rallies were joined only by a few dozen supporters and did not garner the support of the Catholic Church.

The situation changed when the religious character of the reactionary movement was downplayed by new public rallies Proud of Family (organised annually since 2012) and March for Life (organised in 2013, 2015, 2019). These rallies were presented as civic initiatives to engender the protection of life from conception and the protection of families established through the union of a man and a woman. After the March for Life in September 2013 successfully mobilised several tens of thousands of supporters, the Episcopal Conference of Bishops of Slovakia warned people against the ‘culture of death’ spread through the LGBTQ+ agenda in a Pastoral Letter released in December 2013. The letter had a massive reach, because it was read as a homily in Catholic churches across Slovakia – a country in which 62 percent of the population identifies as Roman-Catholics (SODB, 2011). Less than two weeks later, the Alliance for Family (Aliancia za rodinu), an umbrella civic association of pro-life and pro-family organisations, was established, adopting the rhetoric and visual representations of the international network of anti-gender movements (see Paternotte & Kuhar, 2017).

In 2014, the conflict between conservative and progressive positions on gay rights started to culminate. First, the Amendment to the Act of Marriage, defining marriage as the bond between a man and a woman, was ratified. In April 2014, the Alliance for Family launched the public collection of signatures for the ‘Referendum for Family.’² Doubts surfaced about the relevance of the referendum, since after the acceptance of the Amendment, the referendum could only confirm the status quo. LGBTQ+ activists and human rights experts expressed their concerns about the development of the situation in an open letter. In the summer of 2014, the slogan ‘Come out with Family’ was adopted by Rainbow Pride as a reaction to the situation. In the fall of 2014, public controversy continued over the acceptance of the National Strategy and Action Plan for Gender Equality. After the Alliance for Family announced the referendum, which had the support of 400.000 signatures, progressive NGOs, activists, scholars, and independent media formed an opposition block declaring the referendum a blow against human rights. The public initiative Let’s Say No to the Nonsense Referendum organised a hunger strike and mobilised people via social media. At the turn of 2015, a series of public and media discussions were organised between referendum proponents and opponents about the meaning of family and gay rights. Opponents united under the boycott campaign We Won’t Go, mobilising people to ignore the referendum. A month before, LGBTQ+ activists had withdrawn from public discussion with referendum proponents because they were concerned about the intensification of public polarisation. Eventually, the result of the referendum on 7 February 2015 was not valid, because the voter turnout did not reach the 50 percent threshold to make the results binding.³

Nevertheless, since the referendum, the ‘conflict over family’ has not abated, resonating within the Slovak public and political spheres. The Alliance for Family initiated the campaign ‘Vote for Family’, consisting of a ‘Declaration for Family’ to be signed by political candidates as their commitment to ‘pro-family values.’ The campaign was launched before the parliamentary elections in 2016, the regional elections in 2017, and the presidential election in 2019. The ‘conflict over family’ garnered significant public attention during the 2019 presidential campaign, in which the current president, Zuzana Čaputová, explicitly articulated her affirmative position towards gay rights and liberal politics. Moreover, the conflict was actuated also by the controversy around the Istanbul Convention.⁴ In 2017, the former organisers of the referendum initiated a publicity campaign against ratification of the Convention. They argued that the Convention was discriminatory and gender-ideological, because it differentiated between sex and gender. Additionally, since 2012, the conservative rally Proud of the Family has been organised annually on the day of the Rainbow Pride – the public gathering for gay rights. In reaction to the neo-conservative concerns over the endangered ‘traditional family’, the Rainbow Pride has adopted the slogan ‘For All Families’ to challenge the conservative notion of one family model.

My analysis of meaning making among actors engaged in the ‘conflict over family’ in Slovakia is supported by theories of cultural sociology (CS) and pragmatic sociology (PS). In this section, I propose a nuanced and culturally sensitive approach to explore meaning making based on the dialogue of these two theoretical approaches. I draw upon: (1) the strong programme in cultural sociology proposed by Alexander and Smith (2003) and developed through the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University; and (2) French pragmatic sociology, also known as the sociology of critical capacity or the theory of regimes of justification, proposed by Boltanski and Thévenot (1999, 2006) and later extended by Thévenot (2014) into a theory of regimes of engagement. These two approaches are both sensitive to processes of agency and meaning making among individuals, as well as the macro-cultural frameworks that enable and constrain these processes (Silber, 2003, p. 429). Therefore, a certain affinity and complementarity exists between these two schools of thought, from which they can mutually benefit.

CS posits culture as a structured realm of meaning making which underlies observable social action. It strives to identify the deep generative principles of meaning making reflected in surface variations of who says what, why, and to what effect (Alexander & Smith, 2003, pp. 11–14). PS looks at how people make sense of their behaviour and how they justify it by drawing upon preestablished cultural arrangements (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, p. 144). Both approaches assume that meaning making is not merely an individual mental activity but rather a cultural process informed and structured by collective cultural repertoires. Moreover, both PS and CS provide these cultural repertoires with analytical autonomy. The autonomy of culture is the central claim of the strong programme in CS – cultural structures must be analytically distinguished from other social structures and treated as an independent variable with explanatory power (Alexander & Smith, 2003, p. 12; Kane, 1997). PS seems to share this ‘need to explore “culture structures” as autonomous, irreducible formations with their own internal contents and principles of organization’ (Silber, 2016, p. 165). However, sometimes PS also raises criticism concerning the emphasis that CS places on the autonomy of culture, arguing that culture is not ‘free floating’ but always bound to the specific context from which cultural repertoires derive. I would argue that bracketing out the cultural realm from social structure does not make it free floating, because it is always situated within a specific debate, place and historical time. In other words, when following the principle of culture’s analytical autonomy, the cultural context is not brought to the data from ‘outside’ by the researcher; it is reconstructed from the data within. I adopt this principle for my study of meaning making – analyzing the meaning production of civically engaged actors as the employment of a patterned and self-contained system that has the capacity to drive, inform, and shape their actions.

In this article, I combine the emphasis by CS on the moral and emotional dimensions of meaning making processes with the more layered approach of PS to study meaning production within different regimes and spheres. Firstly, the strong programme in CS builds upon theories of symbolic anthropology that bring to the fore the moral structure of social life (Douglas, 1966). The cultural realm is theorised as a reservoir of morally loaded collective representations that take concrete form in symbols, metaphors, allegories, icons, and narratives that are constructed, reconstructed, and lived by social actors to make sense of the world and their own place within it. Individuals and collectives not only engage with these cultural repertoires cognitively and intentionally to make sense of situations and actions, but these repertoires are also deeply embedded in their feelings and may remain unrecognised in shaping their actions (Goodwin & Jasper, 2004, pp. 24–25). Thus, the study of culture from the CS perspective is the study of feelings, common sense, and the taken-for-granted aspects of social life. I follow this perspective on culture in my analysis of civic engagement on both levels – as, firstly, the work that can be justified in respect to the common good and, secondly, as the activity of personal attachment – with the aim to bring to the fore the non-intentional and implicit cultural meanings that make engagement significant. I am also interested in the interplay of these two levels and in how they create together the whole of meaningful work.

Secondly, French PS proposes distinguishing among different frames of meaning making bounded by specific contexts through introducing the concept of ‘orders of worth’ and the ‘grammar of modes of justification’. Boltanski and Thévenot (1999) originally identified six orders of worth: inspired, domestic, civic, opinion, market, and industrial, which are ruled by different principles of justice (1999, p. 368). The concept of ‘worth’ refers to ‘matters that matter’ within a specific setting and calibrate meaningfulness and criticism in respect to that setting (Silber, 2016, pp. 167–168). Whereas orders of worth represent differentiation among horizontal regimes of justification, the later-introduced ‘regimes of engagement’ allow researchers to identify a vertical plurality of recognition formats (Thévenot, 2007, p. 418). ‘Engagement’ refers to what is relevant to people on a certain level of their relation to the world – ‘from close familiar attachments to milieu to highly generalized and abstracted causes’ (Thévenot, 2014, p. 7). The theories concerning regimes of justification and regimes of engagement provide a horizontal and vertical fabric to study how people make sense of the world, and formulate their concerns or demands of justice. While my study tackles one particular regime of justification on the horizontal axis – the civic order of worth – it aims to shed more light on the composition of the vertical axis, from close attachment to justification by abstract ideals. Following CS’s definition of culture as an underlying and omnipresent realm, I presuppose that both levels are embedded in deep cultural structures that can be reconstructed from the narrative accounts of civically engaged actors.

Scholarship in CS and PS guide my analytical approach to ‘civic engagement’ and ‘civically engaged actors’. Both CS and PS formulate their theories of the civic/civil⁵ realm of society as a specific realm of action, institutions, justice, and meaning making. Alexander (2006) has elaborated a complex theory of the ‘civil sphere’ as not only an institutional but also a moral and symbolic sphere of solidarity rooted in subjectivity that creates structures of feelings (2006, p. 54). Civil sphere actors, such as activists, members of civic associations, or representatives of social movements, are dependent on symbolic communication to translate their particular concerns into universalising discourse about the common good (Alexander, 2006, p. 229). Similarly, Boltanski and Thévenot (1999) theorise the ‘civic order of worth’. In the civic world, citizens direct themselves towards the common good by subordinating their will to the disembodied sovereign of general interest (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999, p. 371). The civic order of worth is, however, not bound only to engagement in justification for the common good, but also to a wide plurality of regimes of engagement, including the regime of familiar attachment, sustained together through the ‘art of composition’ (Thévenot, 2014, p. 14). In other words, actors are capable of forming personal attachments characterised by ease and familiarity, which do not require further justification, and, at the same time, maintaining their actions as justifiable to the public.

All these premises have helped me to develop a nuanced theoretical foundation to study meaning making among civically engaged actors. I reconstruct the meaning-making processes of these individuals by bringing to the fore the deep culturally shared structures of meanings and feelings. I assume that civically engaged actors must draw upon a certain moral vocabulary to justify their actions within the civil sphere. In addition to the justification of their engagement, I am interested in how they communicate their personal attachment to their work, in other words, how they formulate the personal meaningfulness of their work that helps them persist in their civic engagement. This analytical task is supported by the theoretical background built upon the synergies between CS and PS: while PS helps me to distinguish the level of justification from the level of personal attachment in studying civic engagement, CS makes it possible to access both levels by reconstructing deep cultural structures in the meaning-making process. I want to make explicit that I do not intend to ‘reveal a true and objective reasoning’ taking place in actors’ minds. Neither justification nor meaning making is ever completed or finally achieved to be taken-for-granted (Silber, 2016, p. 161). Rather, I aim to explore the practice of the actors to imbue their work with meaning when they are asked to talk about what they do and why they do it.

This article is based on a qualitative, interpretative study of twenty interviews with representatives of the ‘conflict over family’ who are current or past active members of civic associations engaged in the conflict. Out of twenty participants, ten are members of conservative associations voicing concerns about the ‘traditional family’, also calling themselves ‘pro-lifers,’⁶ and the other ten are individuals engaged in progressive, LGBTQ+ non-governmental organisations defending the rights of women and gay people. Since the conflict occurs between conservative and progressive visions of family rights, I address the research participants as ‘conservatives’ or ‘progressives’ in this article,⁷ rather than using normative labels.

I used the strategy of purposeful sampling to select the participants. My criterion for selection was active engagement in the civic associations driving the ‘conflict over family’ in Slovakia. The events around the 2015 referendum focused my attention towards a few particular associations and their publicly known representatives and members engaging in the debate about gay rights and the meaning of family. I located the civically engaged actors from both the ‘pro-traditional-family’ and LGBTQ+ civic sectors, especially those appearing in public debates and media as spokespersons for the civic associations. Out of the sample of twenty participants, five conservatives and eight progressives were, at the time of our interview, leaders of non-governmental and non-profit civic associations. Except for two progressives, all participants were either employed by the organisations or otherwise self-employed but working in them. More than half of the participants, four conservatives and seven progressives, pursued a parallel career outside the civic sector. All but one of the interviewed actors were university educated. Since the studied field is relatively small (considering the country size and the selection of publicly known actors), I do not include a table of participant characteristics in order to maintain their anonymity; I also use pseudonyms for all participants.

The interviews were conducted over a period of two years, between March 2016 and March 2018. The research was based on the abductive reasoning that follows the grounded theory method. Abduction involves a process of simultaneous data collection and analysis, shifting back and forth between data and theory. It enables the researcher to construct and re-construct an analytical puzzle while gathering the data: ‘Like a camera with many lenses, first you view a broad sweep of the landscape. Subsequently, you change your lens several times to bring scenes closer and closer into view’ (Charmaz, 2006, p. 14). In this respect, the interviewing phase and the analytical phase overlapped until I was able to reach theoretical saturation of the data. Abductive research relies on constructivist epistemology and the premise that data are constructed by both researchers and participants in their mutual interaction (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012, p. 172). The assumption is that when asked about their work and its meaning, research participants strive for logical consistency in their speech, creating a meaningful whole out of their activities and attitudes. Interviewing always takes place in the context of a particular socially constructed situation and it is a suitable method to analyze how people suffuse their experiences, attitudes, and environments with meaning. I conducted the interviews utilising the principles of ‘comprehensive interviewing’ (Ferreira, 2014; Kaufmann, 2010). The interviews were based on an empathetic approach with the aim to gain deeper insight and understanding into the work and meaning making of participants.⁸ To conduct a comprehensive interview is to engage in a meaningful mutual dialogue, in which both the interviewer and interviewee are involved in composing the narratives that imbue the experiences of interviewees with meaning (Ferreira, 2014, pp. 124–125).

I developed the analytical approach to the data from the interviews drawing upon the structural hermeneutics – the fundamental theoretical perspective of the strong programme in cultural sociology, which can be adopted as a methodological view on data. The goal is to identify specific patterns and mechanisms through which culture works, combined with an interpretative emphasis on reconstructing culture as a rich text (Alexander & Smith, 2003, p. 23). This cultural-sociological approach is synergistic with pragmatic sociology scholarship, because it allows the researcher to focus in detail on different levels and categories of meanings (personal, political, strategic, moral, etc.) without losing perspective on the meaningful whole. It results in the reconstruction of landscapes of cultural meanings to provide an interpretive explanation of the studied phenomenon (Reed, 2011). In this respect, I systematically analysed the language of the participants by identifying, firstly, core cultural codes, moving towards a broader web of meanings. I coded the data using Atlas.ti software, proceeding from an initial round of open coding to focused coding and writing analytical memos. I also employed thick description (Geertz, 1973) to preserve the richness and temper of meaning-making. To approach the data as a complex text saturated with meanings, I created thick summaries of interviews with careful attention to detailed meanings. In this way I proceeded towards further ‘thickening’ the meaning making of the participants. The codes, memos, and summaries brought together a complex picture of the meaning-making practices concerning the most saturated category of ‘help.’ This finding subsequently led me to examine the helping discourse in detail with special sensitivity to its moral and emotional dimensions. I analysed different accounts of helping by focusing on, firstly, their relation to different meanings in the codes and, secondly, on their inner structure of meanings.

To provide the reader with a complex picture of what being a member in the civic associations engaged in the ‘conflict over family’ means to my research participants, this section thickly describes meaning making of their everyday activities. Although struggling for different goals, both groups of actors are engaged in a similar set of activities as strategies to pursue their objective to bring about change in the world for the common good – the order of worth in the civic world (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999, p. 371). To present an overview of their activities, I introduce a typology of macro-, meso- and micro-levels of civic engagement, based on the size of the change the actors aim to bring about in: (1) the social-political system, (2) particular communities, and (3) individual lives.

Advocacy and policy making are everyday activities for the majority of the people engaged in the civic associations involved in the ‘conflict over family’. Their activities include direct political lobbying, as well as creating strategic action plans within governmental advisory boards (of which six participants in this study are active members). In both political groups, all these activities have the common aim to bring about change in the social-political system that reflects their conception of a better society. While the progressive actors strive for the institutionalisation of civil unions and implementation of anti-discriminatory measures for LGBTQ+ people, the conservative actors aim to inhibit such legislative arrangements through amendments to marriage and family law that exclude same-sex partnerships.

Notwithstanding these conflicting conceptions of a ‘good society’, both groups interpret their efforts at system change as a form of helping:

Both Milan and Marek justify their effort to change the system as being able to help more people or being a ‘kind of helper’ – rather than by referring to the abstract ideals of their moral-political worldviews. ‘Helping’ constitutes a vital moral discourse that concretises the notion of civic solidarity – the order of worth in the civic world that can be accessed by distancing oneself from private interests and subordinating them to the collective (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, p. 108). Helping discourse allows this abstract and universal commitment of solidarity to take a concrete and imagistic form (Alexander, 2006, p. 38). Thus, activities enwrapped in the meaning of ‘help’ come to operate as an intelligible and suggestive meaning-making mechanism that reduces the distance between personal interests and an orientation towards others, which appeals to a sense of justice in the civic world.

What is more, through the notion of ‘being a helper’, this discourse arouses feelings of one’s own meaningfulness. As Milan later puts it: ‘I feel it is very meaningful’. The effort to change the system as a means to help others can be a way to pursue a meaningful life; thus, such work acquires a great deal of personal relevance. It is the capacity of the civic polity to provide the ground for people to ‘overcome the uneasy uncertainty about worth and identity’ (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, p. 117). According to Alexander (2006, p. 62), this is the result of everyday essentialism within the civil sphere: although social actors ascribe to their work the meaning of help themselves, this meaning seems a natural quality of the work, also in routine periods outside of the moments in which they face criticism and the need to justify their position. Therefore, civically engaged activities are not only cognitively understood but also emotionally felt as meaningful (Jasper, Goodwin, & Polletta, 2001, p. 15). ‘Pursuing work which helps others’ and ‘being the person who helps’ are powerful mechanisms of justification deeply embedded in the feelings of the actors.

Although communicating a broader vision of a good society, the civic associations engaged in the ‘conflict over family’ are bound to the interests of particular social segments – either LGBTQ+ or Christian-conservative citizens – that they have translated into the general language of the common good (Alexander, 2006, p. 231). However, the meaning of help is not lost in this translation. In fact, it provides a powerful uniting element of meaning making, because it can be easily ascribed to both efforts – to change the system and to empower a community. The actors engage in three areas of strategic activities to build their respective civic communities: publishing activity (mainly blogging), public rallies, and edification workshops.

First, writing texts for blog platforms, online media and brochures of the civic associations has been interpreted by the participants from both groups as a form of help to others:

These quotations show that, first, blogging itself is considered as provision of help to others, and second, civically engaged work does not lose its meaning, even if the actors do not succeed in changing the whole system. The focus on help to certain groups through addressing them via written texts can be just as meaningful as the efforts at system change.

Another strategy to build a civic community by raising public concern includes the organisation of edification⁹ lectures in schools. While members of progressive civic associations provide lectures on the prevention of homophobia and LGBTQ+ discrimination, through European Union projects for informal education, the conservative associations organise lectures about romantic (heterosexual) relationships and sexuality, promoting sexual restraint. The edification is self-fulfilling for the actors through its potential to influence the people they educate over the long term:

Michal makes sense of the lectures he organises as a form of moral investment in a better future for individuals as well as society at large. Even if the impact of such activity is not immediately apparent, as a moral investment, it does not lose its meaningfulness and remain self-fulfilling. Moreover, the metaphor of seeds transforming into fruit refer to the implicit goal of edification – building the civic community which has, eventually, the potential to bring about system change.

The organisation of public rallies, such as Rainbow Pride or the Christian-conservative March for Life and Proud of Family, constitutes another area of work in the civic associations aimed at raising public concerns and building a community of supporters. Moreover, community building is supported by operating community centres within the civic associations, where friendly relations are easily established. In the case of progressive associations, community centres provide a safe space for LGBTQ+ individuals, whereas conservatives establish family centres closely related to the Catholic Church, which generate self-supporting networks of Christian families. Community building as a meso-level activity of civically engaged work interconnects with activities on other two levels – supporting individuals by organising them into communities and, by doing so, also generating the political capital to lobby for the systemic change by translating particular group interests into the universal language of the common good.

Civic associations from both sides of the political spectrum also provide personalised help through their counselling centres. On this level, the category of change merges with category of help. Progressive civic associations run counselling centres for LGBTQ+ individuals and their relatives, providing them with psychological, social, and legal aid. Conservative associations and their community centres engage in pre-marital counselling for (heterosexual) couples and supporting multiple-child families and families in need. Moreover, they are directly connected with counselling centres for pregnant women in need, providing them with psychological and financial aid to prevent them from having an abortion.¹⁰ The counselling is, in both cases, articulated as a helping profession:

Civic associations on both sides of the conflict identify their target group for direct help provision corresponding with their civic communities discussed above. The individuals provided with help embody specific characteristics of that community – as either LGBTQ+ individuals or as people who fit into the image of the ‘traditional family’. In the civic world, individual needs can be seen as relevant and worthy only when representing a group or collective (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999, p. 372). Community empowerment is supported by personal empowerment through providing direct help to members of these communities.

The activities of all levels in which my participants are involved are interconnected through the discursive category of ‘helping’ and constitute a unit of meaningful and morally charged work: macro-level system change aspires to bring about positive change for individual lives and vice-versa, and the meso-level activities are meant to be both personally enriching and politically mobilising. The special moral significance of civically engaged work is expressed by both groups of participants:

The participants communicate the meaningfulness of their work as engagement in helping others. The helping discourse permeates the language of actors on both sides of the progressive-conservative spectrum and is employed in making sense of all types of activities. In my reading, this occurs because, first, the provision of help concretises the abstract worth of civic solidarity; second, ‘being a helper’ is not only understood but also felt as meaningful; third, ‘help’ is a self-explanatory moral indicator – it works as what Thévenot (2007, p. 417) calls a conventional quality for justifiable action engagement within the civic world. In other words, ‘helping’ is a meaning category of deep cultural common-sense that does not need further justification.

This section closely scrutinises the semantics of helping discourse among the research participants with aim of elucidating how they formulate their attachments to their helping work. I have already introduced the argument that making sense of their work through category of ‘helping’ concretises the abstract ideals of the civic world, namely, the common good and civic solidarity. Nevertheless, ‘helping’ itself still appears as quite a general concept. Following the cultural-sociological premise that discourse is always concrete and elaborated in various modes, primarily in narrative accounts (Alexander, 2006, p. 63; Kane, 1997, pp. 257–258), I explore the inner logic of actors’ narrations about helping through their civic engagement. First, I identify the common structural principles of these narrations and reconstruct a general meaning-making model – the ‘narrative of helping’. Second, I shed more light on meanings that inhere in the narrative of helping – feelings of moral duty, moral satisfaction, and empowerment.

In our interviews, the participants shared with me particular cases of help provision they had been engaged in. Although these ‘helping episodes’ vary in contexts, persons, and situations, they show commonalities in their semantic structure. I identify three discursive components of these episodes: (1) the difficult life of people in need before receiving help, (2) the act of help that brings improvement, and (3) the better future for the people who were helped. Let’s consider the following helping episode recounted by a participant from the progressive civic sector:

The young man being thrown out of the house represents the difficult life situation of a person in need. Then comes the helping intervention – driving to the small village to pick him up and find him a place to stay. The result is the general improvement of the young man’s life. This semantic structure corresponds with the conventional story structure: ‘[T]he simplest possible story contains three interrelated events, of which the first and third state a certain situation, while the second is active. The third event depicts a change in the state of affairs as compared to the first event’ (Prince, 1973; as cited in Alasuutari, 1995, p. 71). The same narrative structure can be identified in stories articulated by conservative ‘traditional family’ proponents: The various episodes of helping recalled by participants from both sides of the conflict reveal the same underlying meaning structure, which I have called ‘the narrative of helping’. Narrative is a deep meaning-making mechanism which is not necessarily reflected upon by social actors but informs their actions by shaping their understanding of the world and of themselves (Smith, 2005, p. 18). The plot of the narrative of helping lies in the helping intervention as a change in people’s lives. This change is accentuated by the language of ‘before’ and ‘after’, which forms a unity of the narrated event and distinguishes it from a mere incident (Koselleck, 2004, p. 106). To stress the significance of the helping intervention, the stages ‘before help’ and ‘after help’ are contrasted through moral categories in binary relation. While the ‘before help’ stage is represented in terms of danger and disorder, the ‘after help’ stage communicates safety and order, touching upon a symbolic and morally charged binary opposition (Douglas, 1966). The binary meanings folded into the temporal language of before and after are the cornerstones of social narratives (Alexander, 2011, p. 25). The active transformation of the former stage into the latter through the provision of help is attributed with the hallmark of a morally right and necessary act. In this regard, the narrative of helping is a narrative about the moral virtue of the engaged actors.

The act of helping articulated in the form of the morally loaded narrative of helping arouses a specific moral commitment shared by both progressive and conservative engaged actors. This commitment is expressed as a feeling of the strong moral duty to endure:

These participants feel their civic engagement as a personal commitment to a moral duty that must be fulfilled. This moral responsibility for action is allocated by the narrative of helping (Kane, 1997, p. 258; Smith, 2005, p. 18). The commitment to engagement shows up on two levels: (1) the commitment to meet the needs of others, as the first quotation demonstrates; and (2) the commitment to one’s own worldview, as noted in the second quotation. Together with the feeling of moral duty, the participants express the feeling of personal satisfaction. The actors give voice to their deep moral commitments and, by doing so, feel moral pride in doing the right thing (Jasper, 2009, pp. 83–84). The moral satisfaction stems from the narrative of helping: The narrative of helping as a deep meaning structure creates the conditions for developing feelings of commitment and satisfaction, upon which the actors build up their personal attachment to their work in civic associations.

The double role of helping as both moral commitment and moral satisfaction can be seen as a psychological contradiction – doing something for others and doing something for oneself at the same time. Nevertheless, in the volunteering and helping professions, ‘self-interests and interests in others’ benefit are more complementary than antithetical’ (Hayakawa, 2014, p. 28). These two dimensions relate to different regimes of engagement that are united through composition work (Thévenot, 2009, p. 808). The moral duty of helping accentuates civic solidarity as a justifiable qualification for civic worth, whereas personal comfort and the ease of the familiar are maintained through feelings of satisfaction from helping (Thévenot, 2014, p. 14). Thus, the narrative of helping serves not only as a concrete form of justification for being civically engaged, but also as a way to articulate personal attachment to this work. The narrative of helping as the underlying meaning structure in the language of the interviewed participants enables them to present their engaged practice as beneficial both for society and for themselves. The civically engaged work thus contributes to the quality of life for the engaged actors, who consequently create their personal attachments to pursue this work.

This complementarity of the interest in others and interest in oneself within civic engagement is related to the last dimension of the narrative of helping – the capacity for empowerment. Empowerment through helping is twofold: the act of help empowers both the recipients and the providers of help. First, the recipients are empowered either by enhancement of their financial and social situation, typically through the charity work of Christian-conservative associations, or by their psychological and personal growth, a specialisation among LGBTQ+ associations. The empowerment of recipients can be reconstructed from the narratives of helping articulated by providers:

Through the narrative of helping, participants from both groups point out the empowerment among the people they have helped. The empowerment of the recipients of help is articulated as the process of integration into society and gaining independence. Second, by employing the narrative of helping, the participants also construct a self-image of helpers that is empowering for themselves. In the helping relationship, the helpers adopt a higher position in the power hierarchy over the recipients of help, because being helpful also means being active and powerful towards those represented as passive and helpless, therefore powerless.¹² However, the actuation of this power principle is justified in helping professions as a morally right act (Guggenbühl-Craig, 2010, p. 14). Thus, the civically engaged work enwrapped in meanings of help has the capacity to generate feelings of one’s own empowerment, which is morally acceptable and welcome. Receiving help and providing help are mutually intertwined and empowering for both the recipients and the providers.

The combination of the feelings of moral duty, moral satisfaction, and double empowerment creates fertile soil for the civically engaged actors to form personal attachments to their work. These feelings are actuated by the narrative of helping as a deep meaning-making mechanism of civic engagement, which the engaged actors employ to highlight the capacity of their work to transform the lives of others for the better. The meaning of civic engagement as help plays a threefold role: First, it serves as justification of the engagement in the civic world by communicating a moral commitment to selflessly do something for others. Second, it arouses moral satisfaction by creating a self-image of being a morally good person who helps. Third, help is empowering not only for its recipients but also for the providers – the narrative of helping allows civically engaged actors to present themselves as powerful enough to transform lives of the others. When the actors employ the meanings of help in their meaning making about their work, they compose the civic engagement as both justifiable engagement and familiar engagement to which they become personally attached.

This article provides a culturally sensitive investigation of meaning making among social actors engaged in the ‘conflict over family’ in Slovakia. The analytical reconstruction of their narrations about their everyday work shows that actors from both sides of the conflict make sense of their civic engagement through helping discourse. ‘Helping’ permeates the language of the research participants when talking about diverse activities that fall under the scope of their civically engaged work. I argue that the activities, ranging from lobbying to change the political-societal system, to the building of civic communities, to the provision of individual counselling, are united under a meaningful whole as ‘helping activities’. Moreover, helping concretises the abstract notions of the common good and civic solidarity that present the order of worth in the civic world, thus serving as justification for civic engagement. The participants structure their accounts about helping in narrative form to highlight how their actions transform the lives of others for the better. I identify a common deep meaning structure – the ‘narrative of helping’ – which embodies a moral charge. The narrative elicits feelings of moral duty to sustain civic engagement and the moral satisfaction that comes from doing good things. Moreover, through the narrative of helping, not only those that receive help are empowered; the providers of help are empowered at the same time through building a positive, helping-oriented self-image. In this regard, the actors not only understand but also feel their work as meaningful; hence, they form a personal attachment to it that allows them to persevere in their civic engagement.

In this article, I combine pragmatic and cultural sociology to study how people make sense of their everyday actions. Firstly, I see both theories as contributive to bridging subjectivity and individual action on the micro level with macro cultural processes. The focus on interpretation of cultural repertoires has the potential to explain both how individuals make sense of themselves, and how they coordinate their actions. Secondly, I believe that pragmatic and cultural sociology can also benefit from each other. Pragmatic sociology can benefit from sensitivity towards the underlying moral and emotional dimensions of the justification of action and engagement with the world. I show that meaning production is bound up with feelings, and not only personal attachment, but also justification within the civic world, can be deeply felt. Cultural sociology can benefit from a multi-layered approach to meaning making. While the concept of culture as an underlying realm of action may seem too broad to grasp meaning making in specific contexts and settings, concepts of different orders of worth and regimes of engagement with the world can bring a more nuanced understanding of the things that matter to social actors – from the close and familiar to the abstract and general.

Utilising the combination of these theories, I show that actors with politically conflicting world views carry out their civically engaged activities through the same moral narrative of helping. Civic engagement then becomes a way for all of them to pursue a meaningful life. Stockemer (2018) comes with a similar finding; he shows how for French right-wing and left-wing activists, activism has become a drug that ‘gives them the feeling that they are doing something positive for themselves, their environment and their society’ (p. 199). There are certainly more narratives in play through which the actors make sense of the world; for instance, their visions of a ‘good society’ are articulated in a very different manner. In this article, however, I focused on the central narrative about their everyday work. The morally charged helping discourse that traverses the progressive-conservative political spectrum poses a challenge to the ‘culture wars’ perspective, which suggests that the incompatibility of progressive and conservative worldviews reflect in their use of different discourses (Hunter, 1992; Lakoff, 2002). In my perspective, the conflict between these groups may stem from using not different but the same discourse – the symbolic and moral language of the civil sphere – to speak about different goals. Therefore, although helping discourse may appear a point of intersection between progressive and conservative actors, their concerns often resonate more in echo-chambers rather than meeting in dialogue.

I wish to conclude on a more hopeful note, however. Alexander (2006) argues that, despite the inherently contradictory nature of the civil sphere, it always bears a hope that solidarity and the discourse of liberty will be expanded (p. 552). I believe that bringing to the fore the common helping discourse among social actors engaged in the ‘conflict over family’ can be a fruitful starting point for solidarity expansion in their further debates about the needs of the people they claim to represent. At a time when civil spheres throughout the world are largely polarised, the evidence of a common discourse leaves us with the hope for constructive dialogue between progressive LGBTQ+ rights supporters and conservative ‘traditional family’ advocates on the ground of their declared willingness to help others.

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic as part of its scheme advancing research at universities under the project ‘Sexuality: Attitudes and Behaviour across Generations’ number MUNI/A/1158/2019.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).