Title: Making Religions More Important via implementation of morale penalties for indebted nobles.
Summary: We already have morale penalties for Lords of a different religion and pagan lords, so why not Lords who are grossly in debt to their faith. Peasants should care if their Lord (and in turn the peasants in a Knight's estate, etc) is in good standing with a religion, and should be disheartened if he isn't. By implementing a morale penalty for regions with Lords/Knights who are in debt to their religion, suddenly a religion has more power over nobles.
Details: A check is made every turn to see whether or not nobles are in debt to their religion. If it yes, then their region takes a hit to morale. A larger hit for the Lord, and perhaps a smaller hit for Knights (representing that a Knight only controls a portion of the region). The longer a Lord/Knight is in debt, the larger the hit becomes, and eventually the region will need maintenance.
Benefits: It gives a reason beyond just RP for nobles to remain in good standing with their religion, and makes the Grant/Fee system actually meaningful in a religion, as opposed to a minor inconvenience at worst. From there, religions accumulate more gold and are able to use this towards expanding the religion, or its influence, making religions have a more realistic feel for the time period. It should be easy and straight forward to implement.
Possible Downsides or Exploits: A religion could get rid of fees altogether, or give everyone grants, but a religion that does that can easily find itself quickly out of money and find its infrastructure collapsing quite rapidly, especially the larger religions. This might encourage knights and others towards paganism, but by simply upping the regional stat penalties for pagan lords, and perhaps implementing a penalty for pagan knights, this could be overcome.
