Fort Worth Magazine took the Texas Nationalist Movement’s Texas Citizenship Test, and its columnist passed. In a column published October 7, John Henry walked readers through the test at thetexastest.com, which asks what an independent Texas might ask the people who want to become its citizens.
Henry laid out how it works. Like the federal naturalization test, it uses 20 questions, and 12 right answers pass. The Texas version draws its 20 from a bank of 168 questions on Texas history and how Texas governs itself. A perfect score earns the title “Signer,” named for the men who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence at Washington-on-the-Brazos in 1836.
He found the Texas questions harder than the federal ones. “Unlike the U.S. test, which any reasonably alert houseplant should be able to pass, the Texas test has some challenges,” Henry wrote. He printed five of them, on the war with Mexico that began in 1835, the Texas Open Meetings Act, the Republic of Texas’s debts at annexation, the lowest elected office in a Texas political party, and the Texas Navy’s 1843 fight with Mexico’s steam warships. He passed, he wrote, “though not with a perfect score of 20.”
The column quoted TNM President Daniel Miller: “Washington expects everyone who applies for citizenship to know how the federal government works. Most Texans would like to think they’d pass. Now they can find out.”
The test came to his attention, Henry wrote, when TNM “sent an email to all its subjects.” He also had a theory about it: the test, he suspected, “is designed to increase TNM’s database of email addresses, which it can use to spread its gospel. Lowercase ‘g.’”
Henry also described what TNM is after. “We’re not talking about characters who should be committed to the nearest sanitarium,” he wrote. Miller and his group “disagree with Texas v. White” and believe the question should be settled by “a referendum” in which “the people decide if Texas stays a state or runs off with Jolene.”
TNM launched the test on September 25. It is free, and anyone can take it at thetexastest.com.
Comments have moved. The real debate about Texas independence now happens with thousands of Texians in the app.
Get the TEXIAN app
