How did First Great Awakening help pave the way to the American Revolution?

Answer 1

One key way the Awakening prepared for the Revolution -- it extended ACROSS the different colonies, with involved co-operation amongst them. This helped establish foundations for the colonies' working together, so important to the growth of a united colonial movement in the 1760s and to a unified nation later.

Another factor was that there was a tendency in the Awakening to question and even break with the authorities, at least with those who were not supportive of th Awakening, which probably helped prepare people to more strongly question and finally break with the civil authorities.

One history professor's reflection on this:

"the members of the revolutionary generation had faced, as individuals, important choices about their fundamental religious beliefs and loyalties, and that experience may have prepared them to make equally crucial and basic decisions about their political beliefs and loyalties. More important, no small number of those men and women who converted during the First Great Awakening had defied traditional authorities to uphold their new religious convictions. Some had criticized and ultimately rejected their former ministers or churches for not being sufficiently evangelical, while others had challenged the legitimacy of state-supported churches, which they deemed enemies to individual religious freedom. In short, this was a generation of people who had, during their youth, been schooled in the importance of self-determination and even rebellion against the existing hierarchies of deference and privilege."
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/eighteen/ekeyinfo/erelrev.htm