The Greek Orthodox here have traditionally been quite insular, don't welcome folks to their church (which really is odd in the South - the classic gambit to welcome somebody into the community or to invite them to be friends is to invite them to go to church or Sunday School with you). One of my dad's best friends fell in love with a Greek girl and to say he was shut out doesn't even begin to describe what went on.
It may just be because they feel even more embattled and outnumbered than Catholics in the South.
“It must be getting late at night ‘cause I’m not sure I follow that last one.”
I think you understood just fine! Perhaps the part about them being a bad example even if they were friendly is what threw you.
As for you Dad’s friend, well depending on what part of Greece his girl’s family, or indeed the parish you are familiar with, came from, well it might explain the unfriendliness. There’s another thing too. As recently as 100 years ago, in Wisconsin of all places, a Greek was lynched for consorting with a “white woman”. Greeks weren’t considered “white” into the 1920s. In the South it was bad, very bad, into the early 1960s. Greeks didn’t find friendliness in the WASP South, AAM.
You know, there’s still a concern all of us parents have about our kids marrying outside the Orthodox Church. Indeed, for ethnics, there is even concern about our kids marrying converts. Marriage to other “cradle Orthodox” is fine though; thus Greek/Serb or Greek/Arab etc is OK. To an extent this is a relic of the days when we couldn’t accept marriage outside the Omogenia, the race group (the volk). This was true for all Orthodox so it wasn’t just an issue of religion, it was also an issue of ethnicity.