FAMILY, THE. The religious movement that calls itself "the Family" (though it has also been called the Children of God since its inception) began in the 1960s as the ministry of a particular family and the related musical evangelism called Teens for Christ. Positioning itself in radical opposition to the mainstream churches, which it scorned as worldly "churchianity," it rapidly recruited young adults from the 1960s counterculture and spread beyond its origins in the United States to establish communes around the world. Its visibility made it a target both for secularists aligned with the psychotherapy movement and for some conventional Christians who assumed its unusually high levels of member commitment were caused by brainwashing. Thus, members of the Family were the first victims of forcible "deprogramming," and over a period of years fully six hundred of the group's children were seized by authorities, inadvertently traumatized by...