A couple of days ago, a notorious organization disrupted a health charity event, demanding the event be stopped on the basis that it might be related to the spreading of a certain religion. Their claim was simple, if the event was made to spread religious beliefs, it will cause social unrest within the nearby community.

I find such arguments to be completely unreasonable. It not only shows that the organization does not understand the basic concept of spreading of religion, it also interferes with events that might increase the welfare of society and therefore are beneficial from a legal and economic perspective.

Under Islamic law, one of the valid recipients of "zakat" is "muallaf." These are the people who have just converted to Islam and therefore need to be given more incentives to maintain their faith. In other words, Islam publicly recognizes and validates the use of economic incentives to gain more followers.

The fact that Islam allows the use of economic incentives means that other religions should also be permitted to do the same, and in case Muslims are concerned with the spreading of other religions via economic means, they should also fight back using the same measures. It would be very beneficial to people who are in need if religious organizations compete among themselves to increase their charity spending in order to gain new followers.

Interestingly, people often want to separate economics from religion, fearing that combining them will taint the religion’s sanctity and that it will look very bad in front of God. Again, that is nonsense. In reality, every religion always plays with incentives. And I am quite confident that the general concept of religion is compatible with the notion that humans are rational and will always try to maximize their self-interests, even though they might not be very good in assessing the costs and benefits of their actions and in assessing future risks.

Let us first begin with the concept of heaven and hell. All major religions have such a concept in their teachings. If you always act good or at least the amount of your good deeds outweighs your bad deeds, you will go to heaven with all of its benefits. Meanwhile, if you end up doing more bad deeds, you will go to hell with all of its scary tortures. Like it or not, heaven and hell are the perfect examples of how religions use economic incentives to shape people preferences.

There is a follow-up question though: if people are really rational, how could they still do bad deeds? I have discussed this issue in my previous article, “On Why Religiosity Has not Translated Into Better Legal Compliance,” so I will not discuss it here. But you don’t need to worry, it won’t change my analysis in this article.

Some religious followers believe that the highest level of piety is to act not because of the promise of benefits and punishment by God, but simply because they love God and they want to receive the grace of God. However, it does not necessarily mean that such courses of action are free from economic realities.

These people realize that doing the above will increase their level of religiousness in front of God. Furthermore, the satisfaction that they receive from reaching such a level also maximizes their value. In short, to the extent the benefits outweigh the costs (since it is not easy to reach this level), it is absolutely rational for religious people to chase the grace of God.

Sufi followers desperately train themselves to get rid of individualism by doing religious activities. Yet, I have not uncovered any successful incidents of cleansing our minds of the idea of getting maximum rewards for pleasing God. Deep in our minds, we realize that if we can please God, it will be beneficial to us, even if we don’t expect heaven. We are still bound by our interest in maximizing our rewards.

And there are many good examples of economic incentives and the notion of individuality in religion. Helping other people is not mandatory, it is encouraged unless you are talking about people that are legally dependent on you. Islamic law also recognizes the concept of "fardu kifayah" for more urgent issues that need collective action. This means that the responsibilities of the faithful of a religion are collective. Once one person satisfies the required obligation, the others will be released from any liability of sin.

Having said that, I think religious people should embrace economic realities in their lives and start to contribute to the betterment of society. It is the original goal of religion anyway and would produce the best result for all of us.