Lately I’ve been thinking about this moment from October 3, 1992, when Sinead O’Connor got on live TV and ripped up a picture of the pope. There was an an unprecedented outpouring of complaints, (Frank Sinatra said he wanted to “punch her right in the mouth.”) and the FCC tried to fine NBC. Famously, Saturday Night Live has never re-aired the clip, and the supposedly irreverent show made a public apology the next week. What’s more, O’Connor’s career was never the same. She didn’t attempt to explain or contextualize her actions, and she basically retired from music after the incident.

It’s hard to say if people would react as vociferously if this were to happen today. Would the clip gain momentum in the echo chamber of the Internet, spawning protests and petitions? Or would she be drowned out by other controversies, lacking the viewership and relevance that SNL had on a network in the early ’90s. (Something tells me the Frank Sinatra comment about her would be more controversial than what O’Connor actually did.) For all of our talk of tolerance, do we live in a less religiously respectful culture to begin with? I think most of us would just shrug and say: “Well, consider the source. She’s a wacko radical singer. Who cares what she has to say anyway?”

But consider the source. I don’t personally agree that Pope John Paul II was “the real enemy,” but I do admire O’Connor’s idealism. To an almost laughable degree, she had conviction. You can tell by the intensity of the performance that she legitimately thought singing a Bob Marley song on television could change the world. We took her seriously because she took herself seriously, and the most dangerous thing about this stunt was that it wasn’t a stunt.

If, say, Rihanna ripped up a picture of the pope today, she would be criticized; but we would also have the cynicism to believe that it was something she didn’t really mean. She’s a rebellious kid; she was acting out a publicity stunt. It probably wasn’t even her idea. She would immediately apologize, as if it were a complete accident. She would release some kind of passive-voiced statement about how sorry she was that her actions were “in bad taste,” as if she was wrong only in the way she was interpreted. She would immediately begin a PR campaign to regain the public’s trust. And if she tried hard enough, we would forgive her. It’s hard to imagine Rihanna retiring because she believed in something—anything—too much.

Perversely, we didn’t give Sinead O’Connor this benefit of the doubt because she was genuine. She wanted attention, but for the actual (vague, misguided) cause instead of herself. In this way, she was more naive than any modern pop singer could hope to be. But that youthful idealism is what we punished. She was a threat precisely because she believed in what she did, and she forced other people to evaluate her actions on those terms as well.

Although it’s not a great song, Michael Jackson and Akon’s ridiculously optimistic “Hold My Hand” gave me a charge every time I heard it last year. I knew that it would be a long time before I heard something that idealistic and uplifting on the radio again. Say what you want about MJ, but he believed in his message. The song sounded like a throwback—not because the music changed, but because we did. In 2011, if mainstream music has a message beyond vague celebration, it’s rarely delivered with the kind of meaningful commitment that O’Connor showed on Saturday Night Live. I’m begging for someone in the public eye to wrong us completely and not apologize—to stand up and say: “I thought a lot about what I did. And I don’t care if you’re offended.” That’s exactly what Sinead O’Connor did in a three minute performance I’m still thinking about twenty years later.

The culture around us has been dulled since then, but even now, actions speak louder than words.