This article analyses the representation of futurity in Jean Racine’s Athalie (1691). Athalie is Racine’s final play and the second of his ‘Christian tragedies’, written at the request of Madame de Maintenon for the schoolgirls of Saint-Cyr. It is the culmination of a body of work that foregrounds problems of futurity through emphasis on family, inheritance, and conflicted parent-child relations. Critical theory, and queer theory in particular, are used here to explore the multiplicity of futures staged in the play. This reading of the complex futurity staged in Athalie turns on the relationship between Athalie and Joas, the child who symbolises various kinds of future. The discussion therefore begins with Joas, considering the tension between his individual fate and the collective (Jewish, Christian, and French) futures he symbolises. In her confrontation with the futures Joas may symbolise, and her quasi- maternal proposal of alternatives, Athalie can be read as a paradigmatic figure of ‘queer maternity’ (Power, 2012).