When Sonia Johnson was excommunicated in December 1979, she became a media spectacle. She was excommunicated in relation to her activities opposing the activism of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). One observer described the excommunication and its aftermath as “perhaps the most conspicuous media event in [LDS] church history.”1 The primary theorist of the concept of spectacle, Guy Debord, developed the framing to analyze modern social life in the age of mass consumption and mass media. Debord described how, especially after the invention of advertising, forms of mass communication created images, communicated ideas, ideals, and images, and sold commodities to large portions of the population. Debord called the resulting culture “the society of the spectacle,” in which “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation.”2 The society of the spectacle was the context in which the LDS...

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