Membership protected pages not protected against new visitors

Hello All,
I am having an issue with pages not being affected by the membership plugin settings. I went through the plugin documentation, set up a membership level, created a member with login credentials, was successfully able to login from the membership login screen, and set page protection to only my created membership level but the problem I am having occurs with new visitors. The problem I have is that when someone comes to the page and is not logged in as a member or admin they can still access the page as if there was no protection at all. I am at a loss for what to do.