I was born amidst the tectonic upheaval of the 1960s. Viet Nam. Civil Rights. Assassinations. Urban riots. Landing a man on the moon. My-Lai. Flower Power. LSD. Woodstock. Kent State. The Manson Family murders.

People took to the streets, protesting injustice and corruption. A whole generation found its energy in a continual attempt to “stick it to the man.”

A lot going on back then. About most of which, as a child, I remained blissfully unaware. I had bigger fish to fry—mostly things like Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, and the Addam’s Family—or whether my parents would let me get more than a vanilla cone at the Dairy Queen—because, I mean, that doesn’t sound like too much to ask, right?

I remember primarily mundane things about the late ‘60s and early ‘70s—things like the amazing fireworks haul my uncle Jerry would bring to our Fourth of July celebration on my grandparents’ farm or making a ramp from a sheet of plywood set atop a Red Flyer wagon—off of which we would jump our bikes and Big Wheels. I remember hunting for snakes and toads, trying to avoid the wasps and hornets. I remember eating rhubarb pie and drinking RC Cola—all kinds of things.

What I don’t remember, though, is the great upheaval in the country. Somehow, I felt the tension, I guess, but I figured it didn’t have much to do with me. It was a grownup thing. And not just a grownup thing, but a grownup thing that didn’t have much to do with any of the grownups in my life.

Though protests and marches were taking place—I’ve seen the documentaries and read the accounts—I wasn’t raised by people who marched. I didn’t know any protesters. Nobody in my life put on their Birkenstocks, wrapped me in a baby sling, and went off to tell the world to “make love, not war.” Politics was something on the TV at 6:00, from which I regularly excused myself to play baseball or pound on my little brother; it wasn’t anything I thought had even a lick to do with me.

Consequently, I grew up with a relatively common middle-class contempt for protesters. I don’t know; maybe contempt is too harsh a word. Maybe distaste is better. Whatever it was, I knew that sign-wearers and flag-burners weren’t my people. Folks in my life didn’t “sit in.”

They didn’t take Freedom buses or question the paternal benevolence of law enforcement. We were taught to stand and put our hands over our hearts for the National Anthem, to respect authority, and to assume that the intentions of the people in power were always selfless and true.

The flip side of that deference to authority was the assumption that people who participated in demonstrations were all aimless hippies, intent on taking stuff they hadn’t earned from hardworking folks … like my people. I had a vague belief that people who marched were troublemakers who, if they hadn’t done anything wrong, wouldn’t have such a hard time with the otherwise kindly hand of the state.

Whatever else could be said, I was convinced that protest was unnecessarily negative at best, or cynically anarchist at worst.

When I was a kid, I remember riding with my missionary grandpa, who explained just what kind of religious people we were. I said that we were Protestant.

My grandfather, ever the contrarian, said, “I’m not a Protestant.”

I said, “What do you mean you’re not a Protestant? You’re not Catholic.”

He said, “I’m not a Protestant because I’m not protesting anything. Protesting is for radicals like Abby Hoffman.”

Because, see, protesting in my tribe was a decidedly negative thing. It always sounded like you were against something. Protesting against nuclear arms or nuclear energy, or against the College of the Americas, or against the clubbing of baby seals.

Protest meant questioning the authorities, who—we were assured—had only our best interests in mind. It set you athwart the people in power, which—we were assured—was a position no God-fearing American would ever want to find themselves in.

For my grandfather, protest was so unsavory that he didn’t even want to identify himself as a Protestant.

But then I grew up and went to seminary and got a Master’s degree in church history. I spent a lot of time studying the Protestant Reformation. Now, the Protestant Reformation was, in many respects, a negative protest of some of the excesses of the Catholic Church—many of which the Catholic Church itself worked to reform in what became known as the Counter-Reformation.

But I also learned that Protestant came from the Latin: Protestari, which means to testify publicly on behalf of something or someone—not just against something—but to protest for something.