BY ESTHER O’REILLY

Fans and friends are mourning the sudden death of Mandisa Hundley, an American Idol alum who went on to have a successful contemporary Christian music career. Police are currently investigating cause of death. Her publicist hasn’t released any details except that she was “found dead in her home” in Nashville. She was only 47 years old.

These kinds of deaths are always deeply sad, but the fact that Mandisa was a Christian artist makes her case even more wrenching. She always spoke candidly about her ups and downs with obesity, depression, and sexual assault trauma. In her memoir Out of the Dark, she writes that after being raped by a neighbor boy as a teenager, she deliberately indulged her overeating habit as a way to protect her body from more violence. She wasn’t raised in the church but had a conversion experience in college, after which she eagerly began connecting with the black community’s Christian roots and discovered a gift for music. But at the peak of her recording career, her best friend’s death from cancer plunged her back into an abyss of depression and suicidal thoughts. Other friends staged an intervention and enabled her to recover, but she chose to be honest about her ongoing struggles, which she bravely faced alone as a never-married single woman. While it’s not clear yet if she committed suicide or just had some sort of health episode/accident, suicide is the first thing one tends to think of in such cases.

As a kid, I heard Mandisa’s voice quite a lot on contemporary Christian radio. The CCM channel was always on in the background while I worked on homework, art, and whatever else I was obsessed with in my teens. My tastes weren’t especially “cool,” and being the old soul I was, I tended to just wish they still played the songs little me liked from the 90s. To my ear, the hits increasingly ran together, becoming repetitive and trite. In that vein, Mandisa was one of many artists coming on the scene at the time who just didn’t really register for me....

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/youngfogey/2024/04/when-mandisa-forgave-simon-cowell/