I've seen it claimed a fair few times on these boards that the rise of Protestantism(*) was pretty much inevitable, the reason being that, as literacy increased, the people (or at least the well-off people) would naturally gravitate towards a religion that let them think for themselves rather than one which laid down what was and wasn't acceptable opinion. I think this argument is false, for two main reasons.
Firstly, there doesn't seem to be much correlation between levels of education and levels of Protestantism, which seems rather strange if increased education led to the Reformation. Italy, the home of Renaissance scholarship, remained staunchly Catholic, and there doesn't seem to have been any obvious difference in levels of scholarly development between the Catholic and Protestant parts of Germany or the Netherlands. Britain meanwhile was something of an educational backwater during the early 16th century. So I don't think there's much to suggest that increasing a country's literate population would increase its propensity to go Protestant.
Secondly, it's not at all obvious that Protestant countries allowed greater freedom of thought than Catholic ones. In theory, sure, sola scriptura should translate into freedom of thought; in practice, Protestant countries were every bit as ready as their Catholic neighbours to establish state Churches and punish those who deviated from the official theological line. If people really wanted freedom of thought, there's no reason to think that supporting Protestantism would have promoted this.
(* Defined for the purposes of this discussion as a belief in sola scriptura and sola fide.)