Cultural Resistance and the Interpretation of Taxation in Religious Leader Communities

Abstract

This study examines how religious leaders interpret tax reporting obligations related to voluntary spiritual gifts and how these interpretations generate cultural resistance to taxation. Employing a qualitative case study approach, the research involved 12 religious leaders from Islamic, Christian, and Buddhist communities in urban and semi-urban areas in Indonesia, selected through purposive sampling based on active leadership roles and regular receipt of congregational gifts. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed using thematic coding guided by the Slippery Slope Framework and behavioural tax theory, with theoretical and data triangulation applied to enhance validity. The findings reveal that religious leaders hold divergent interpretations of spiritual gifts: some regard them solely as alms embedded in worship, while others acknowledge their economic function yet resist classifying them as taxable income. This resistance is not primarily driven by intentional non-compliance, but by interpretative processes that redefine the boundary between sacred and economic domains, compounded by limited technical knowledge of tax reporting procedures. This study contributes to the literature by demonstrating that religiosity shapes taxation not only through tax morale or compliance attitudes, as emphasized in prior research, but also through the social construction of “income” itself, offering a novel socio-legal explanation of cultural resistance to taxation grounded in empirical evidence.